SI 






ii\tl!:! 



W»r« 



^^^ 







THE CELTIC TWILIGHT 

MEN AND WOMEN, DHOULS AND 
FAERIES. 



W:^B. YEATS. 



WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY J. B. YEATS. 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND LONDON. 
1894 






A good portion of this book has been printed in the 
'National Observer,' awrf/Ziaz/e to thank the proprietors 
for leave to reprint it here. 

Gift 
T S '06 



Time drops in decay 
Like a candle burnt out. 
And the mountaitis and woods 
Have their day, have their day _ 
But, kindly old rout 
Of the fire-born moods. 
You pass not away. 



THE HOST. 

The host is riding from K?iock?iarea, 
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare ; 
Caolte tossing his burnifig hair, 

And Niam calling, * Away, come away ; 

' A7id brood no more where the fire is bright, 
Tilling thy heart with a mortal dream ; 
For breasts are heaving and eyes a-gleam : 

Away, come away, to the dim twilight. 

'■Anns are a-waving and lips apart ; 
And if any gaze on our rushing band. 
We come between him and the deed of 
his hand. 
We come between him afid the hope of his 
heart.' 

The host is rushiiig Uwixt night and day ; 
Ajid where is there hope or deed as fair 2 
Caolte tossing his burning hair. 

And Niam calling, 'Away, come away.' 



Z-^- 



THIS BOOK. 

Next to the desire, which every artist 
feels, to create for himself a little world 
out of the beautiful, pleasant, and signifi- 
cant things of this marred and clumsy 
universe, I have desired to show in a 
vision s hing of the face of Ireland to 
a?iy of my own people who care for things 
of this kind. I have therefore written 
down accurately and candidly much that 
I have heard and seen, and, except by 
v.ciy of coinmentary, nothing that I have 
merely imagined. I have, however, been 
at no pains to separate my own beliefs 
from those of the peasantry, but have 
rather let my men and women, dhouls 
and faeries, go their way unoffended or 
defended by any argument of mine. The 



/Xi 



X TJiis Book. 

things a man has heard and seen are 
threads of life, and if he pull them care- 
fully from the confused distaff of memory, 
any who will can weave them into what- 
ever garments of belief please them best. 
I too have woven my garment like an- 
other, but I shall try to keep warm in it, 
and shall be well content if it do not 
unbecome me. 

Hope and Memory have one daughter 
and her name is Art, and she has built 
her dwelling far from the desperate field 
where men hang out their garments upon 
forked boughs to be banners of battle. O 
beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, 
be with me for a little. 

W. B. Yeats. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

A TELLER OF TALES 3 

BELIEF AND UNBELIEF ... II 

A VISIONARY . 17 

VILLAGE GHOSTS .. 29 

A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP 45 

THE SORCERERS .. 55 

THE LAST GLEEMAN 67 

REGINA, REGINA PIGMEORUM, VENI ... 83 

KIDNAPPERS 93 

THE UNTIRING ONES I09 

THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS II7 

A COWARD 123 

THE THREE o'bTRNES AND THE EVIL 

FAERIES 129 

DRUMCLIFF AND ROSSES I35 

THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE 153 



xii Contents. 

PACE 

THE RELIGION OF A SAILOR 1 59 

CONCERNING THE NEARNESS TOGETHER 

OF HEAVEN, EARTH, AND PURGATORY 165 

THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS STONES ... 169 

OUR LADY OF THE HILLS 175 

THE GOLDEN AGE I83 

A REMONSTRANCE WITH SCOTSMEN FOR 
HAVING SOURED THE DISPOSITION OF 

THEIR GHOSTS AND FAERIES 1 89 

THE FOUR Vi^INDS OF DESIRE I99 



A TELLER OF TALES. 



A TELLER OF TALES. 

Many of the tales in this book were 
told me by one Paddy Flynn, a little 
bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky 
and one-roomed cabin in the village of 
Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, 
' the most gentle ' — whereby he meant 
faery — ' place in the whole of County 
Sligo.' Others hold it, however, but 
second to Drumcliff and Drumahair. The 
first time I saw him he was cooking mush- 
rooms for himself; the next time he was 
asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. 
He was indeed always cheerful, though I 
thought I could see in his eyes (swift as 



4 TJie Celtic Tivilight. 

the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered 
out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy 
which was well-nigh a portion of their 
joy ; the visionary melancholy of purely 
instinctive natures and of all animals. 

And yet there was much in his life to 
depress him, for in the triple solitude of 
age, eccentricity, and deafness, he went 
about much pestered by children. It was 
for this very reason perhaps that he ever 
recommended mirth and hopefulness. He 
was fond, for instance, of telling how Col- 
iumcille cheered up his mother, ' How 
are you to-day, mother ? ' said the saint. 
' Worse,' replied the mother. ' May you 
be worse to-morrow,' said the saint. The 
next day Collumcille came again, and 
exactly the same conversation took place, 
but the third day the mother said, 
'Better, thank God.' And the saint re- 
pHed, ' May you be better to-morrow.' 



A Teller of Tales. 5 

He was fond too of telling how the Judge 
smiles at the last day alike when he re- 
wards the good and condemns the lost to 
unceasing flames. He had many strange 
sights to keep him cheerful or to make 
him sad. I asked him had he ever seen 
the faeries, and got the reply, ' Am I not 
annoyed with them ? ' I asked too if he 
had ever seen the banshee. ' I have seen 
it,' he said, * down there by the water, 
batting the river with its hands.' 

I have copied this account of Paddy 
Flynn, with a few verbal alterations, from 
a note-book which I almost filled with his 
tales and sayings, shortly after seeing him. 
I look now at the note-book regretfully, 
for the blank pages at the end will never 
be filled up. Paddy Flynn is dead ; a 
friend of mine gave him a large bottle 
of whiskey, and though a sober man at 
most times, the sight of so much liquor 



6 The Celtic Tivilight. 

filled him with a great enthusiasm, and he 
lived upon it for some days and then died. 
His body, worn out with old age and hard 
times, could not bear the drink as in his 
young days. He was a great teller of tales, 
and unlike our common romancers, knew 
how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, 
faeryland and earth, to people his stories. 
He did not live in a shrunken world, but 
knew of no less ample circumstance than 
did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic 
people shall by his like bring back again 
the ancient simplicity and amplitude of 
imagination. What is literature but the 
expression of moods by the vehicle of 
symbol and incident ? And are there not 
moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, 
and faeryland for their expression, no less 
than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are 
there not moods which shall find no ex- 
pression unless there be men who dare to 



A Teller of Tales. 7 

mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland 
together, or even to set the heads of beasts 
to the bodies of men, or thrust the souls 
of men into the heart of rocks? Let us 
go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize 
whatever prey the heart long for, and 
have no fear. Everything exists, every- 
thing is true, and the earth is only a little 
dust under our feet. 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 

There are some doubters even in the 
western villages. One woman told me 
last Christmas that she did not believe 
either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she 
thought was merely an invention got up 
by the priest to keep people good; and 
ghosts would not be permitted, she held, 
to go 'trapsin about the earth' at their 
own free will; 'but there are faeries,' she 
added, ' and little leprechauns, and water- 
horses, and fallen angels.' I have met 
also a man with a mohawk tattooed upon 
his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs 
and unbeliefs. No matter what one 



12 The Celtic Twilight. 

doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, 
as the man with the mohawk on his arm 
said to me, ' they stand to reason.' Even 
the official mind does not escape this 
faith. 

A Httle girl who was at service in the 
village of Grange, close under the seaward 
slopes of Ben Bulben, suddenly disap- 
peared one night about three years ago. 
There was at once great excitement in the 
neighbourhood, because it was rumoured 
that the faeries had taken her. A villager 
was said to have long struggled to hold 
her from them, but at last they prevailed, 
and he found nothing in his hands but 
a broomstick. The local constable was 
applied to, and he at once instituted a 
house-to-house search, and at the same 
time advised the people to burn all the 
bucalauns (ragweed) on the field she 
vanished from, because bucalauns are 



Belief and Unbelief. 1 3 

sacred to the faeries. They spent the 
whole night burning them, the constable 
repeating spells the while. In the morn- 
ing the little girl was found, the story 
goes, wandering in the field. She said 
the faeries had taken her away a great 
distance, riding on a faery horse. At last 
she saw a big river, and the man who had 
tried to keep her from being carried off 
was drifting down it — such are the topsy- 
turvydoms of faery glamour — in a cockle- 
shell. On the way her companions had 
mentioned the names of several people 
who were about to die shortly in the 
village. 

Perhaps the constable was right. It is 
better doubtless to believe much unreason 
and a little truth than to deny for denial's 
sake truth and unreason alike, for when 
we do this we have not even a rush candle 
to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth 



14 The Celtic Twilight. 

to dance before us on the marsh, and 
must needs fumble our way into the great 
emptiness where dwell the mis-shapen 
dhouls. And after all, can we come to 
so great evil if we keep a little fire on our 
hearths, and in our souls, and welcome 
with open hand whatever of excellent 
come to warm itself, whether it be man or 
phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even 
to the dhouls themselves, ' Be ye gone ' ? 
When all is said and done, how do we not 
know but that our own unreason may be 
better than another's truth? for it has 
been warmed on our hearths and in our 
souls, and is ready for the wild bees of 
truth to hive in it, and make their sweet 
honey. Come into the world again, wild 
bees, wild bees ! 



A VISIONARY. 



A VISIONARY. 

A YOUNG man came to see me at my 
lodgings the other night, and began to talk 
of the making of the earth and the heavens 
and much else. I questioned him about 
his life and his doings. He had written 
many poems and painted many mystical 
designs since we met last, but latterly had 
neither written nor painted, for his whole 
heart was set upon making his mind strong, 
vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life 
of the artist was bad for him, he feared. 
He recited his poems readily, however. 
He had them all in his memory. Some 
indeed had never been written down. 



^ >. 



1 8 The Celtic Twilight. 

They, with their wild music as of winds 
blowing in the reeds, seemed to me the 
very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and 
of Celtic longing for infinite things the 
world has never seen. Suddenly it seemed 
to me that he was peering about him a little 

eagerly. ' Do you see anything, X ? ' 

I said. ' A shining, winged woman, covered 
by her long hair, is standing near the door- 
way,' he answered, or some such words. 
' Is it the influence of some living person 
who thinks of us, and whose thoughts ap- 
pear to us in that symbolic form ? ' I said ; 
for I am well instructed in the ways of 
the visionaries and in the fashion of their 
speech. ' No,' he replied ; ' for if it were the 
thoughts of a person who is alive I should 
feel the living influence in my living body, 
and my heart would beat and my breath 
would fail. It is a spirit. It is some one 
who is dead or who has never lived.' 



A Visionary. 19 

I asked what he was doing, and found 
he was clerk in a large shop. His plea- 
sure, however, was to wander about upon 
the hills, talking to half-mad and visionary 
peasants, or to persuade queer and con- 
science-stricken persons to deliver up the 
keeping of their troubles into his care. 
Another night, when I was with him in his 
own lodging, more than one turned up to 
talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and 
sun them as it were in the subtle light of 
his mind. Sometimes visions come to 
him as he talks with them, and he is 
rumoured to have told divers people true 
matters of their past days and distant 
friends, and left them hushed with dread 
of their strange teacher, who seems scarce 
more than a boy, and is so much more 
subtle than the oldest among them. 

The poetry he recited me was full of 
his nature and his visions. Sometimes it 



20 The Celtic Twilight. 

told of other lives he believes himself to 
have lived in other centuries, sometimes 
of people he had talked to, revealing them 
to their own minds. I told him I would 
write an article upon him and it, and was 
told in turn that I might do so if I did 
not mention his name, for he wished to 
be always 'unknown, obscure, impersonal.' 
Next day a bundle of his poems arrived, 
and. with them a note in these words : 
' Here are copies of verses you said you 
liked. I do not think I could ever write 
or paint any more. I prepare myself for 
a cycle of other activities in some other 
life. I will make rigid my roots and 
branches. It is not now my turn to burst 
into leaves and flowers.' 

The poems are all endeavours to capture 
some high, impalpable mood in a net of 
obscure images. But something can be 
known of their charm from three verses 



A Visiojiary. 2 1 

which I rescue gladly from the caprice of 
the gods who rule over a mystic's manu- 
script. They are addressed to a girl, whom 
he knew, I understand, in another life, 
and tell how he died out of a dream of 
love centuries before his present body was 
born. 

As from our dreams we died away 
Far off I felt the outer things, 

Your wind-blown tresses round me play, 
Your bosom's gentle murmurings. 

And far away our faces met 

As on the verge of the vast spheres ; 

And in the night our cheeks were wet, 
I could not say with dew or tears. 

As one within the Mother's heart, 

In that hushed dream upon the hight, ' 

We lived, and then rose up to part. 
Because her ways are infinite. 

One or two other poems have a like per- 
fection of feehng, but deal with more im- 
palpable matters. There are fine passages 
in all, but these will often be imbedded 



22 The Celtic Tzvilight. 

in thoughts which have evidently a special 
value to the writer's mind, but are to other 
men merely the counters of an unknown 
coinage. To them they seem merely so 
much brass or copper or tarnished silver 
at the best. Sometimes he illustrates his 
verses with Blake-like drawings, in which 
rather incomplete anatomy does not alto- 
gether hide extreme beauty of feeling. 
The faeries in whom he believes have 
given him many subjects, notably Thomas 
of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the 
twilight while a young and beautiful 
creature leans softly out of the shadow 
and whispers in his ear. He delights above 
all in strong effects of colour : spirits who 
have upon their heads instead of hair the 
feathers of peacocks ; a phantom reaching 
from a swirl of flame towards a star; a 
spirit passing with a globe of iridescent 
crystal — symbol of the soul — half shut 



A Visionary. 23 

within his hand. But always under this 
largess of colour lies some tender homily 
addressed to man's fragile hopes. This 
spiritual eagerness draws to him all those 
who, like himself, seek for illumination or 
else mourn for a joy that has gone. One 
of these especially comes to mind. A 
winter or two ago he spent much of the 
night walking up and down upon the 
mountain talking to an old peasant who, 
dumb to most men, poured out his cares 

for him. Both were unhappy : X 

because he had then first decided that art 
and poetry were not for him, and the old 
peasant because his life was ebbing out 
with no achievement remaining and no 
hope left him. Both how Celtic ! how full 
of striving after a something never to be 
completely expressed in word or deed. 
The peasant was wandering in his mind 
with prolonged sorrow. Once he burst 



24 The Celtic Twilight. 

out with ' God possesses the heavens — 
God possesses the heavens — but He covets 
the world ' ; and once he lamented that 
his old neighbours were gone, and that all 
had forgotten him : they used to draw a 
chair to the fire for him in every cabin, 
and now they said, ' Who is that old 
fellow there?' 'The fret' [Irish for 
doom] 'is over me,' he repeated, and then 
went on to talk once more of God and 
heaven. More than once also he said, 
waving his arm towards the mountain, 
' Only myself knows what happened under 
the thorn tree forty years ago ; ' and as he 
said it the tears upon his face glistened in 
the moonlight. 

This old man always rises before me 

when I think of X . Both seek — 

one in wandering sentences, the other in 
symbolic pictures and subtle allegoric 
poetry — to express a something that lies 



A Visio7iary. 25 

beyond the range of expression ; and both, 

if X will forgive me, have within them 

the vast and vague extravagance that lies 
at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The 
peasant visionaries that are, the landlord 
duelists that were, and the whole hurly- 
burly of legends — Cuchulin fighting the 
sea for two days until the waves pass over 
him and he dies, Caolte storming the 
palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain 
for three hundred years to appease his 
insatiable heart with all the pleasures of 
faeryland, these two mystics walking up 
and down upon the mountains uttering 
the central dreams of their souls in no less 
dream-laden sentences, and this mind that 
finds them so interesting — all are a portion 
of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose 
meaning no man has discovered, nor any 
angel revealed. 



VILLAGE GHOSTS. 



VILLAGE GHOSTS. 

In the great cities we see so little of 
the world, we drift into our minority. In 
the little towns and villages there are 
no minorities ; people are not numerous 
enough. You must see the world there, 
perforce. Every man is himself a class; 
every hour carries its new challenge. 
When you pass the inn at the end of the 
village you leave your favourite whimsy 
behind you; for you will meet no one 
who can share it. We listen to eloquent 
speaking, read books and write them, 
settle all the affairs of the universe. The 
dumb village multitudes pass on un- 



30 The Celtic Twilight. 

changing; the feel of the spade in the 
hand is no different for all our talk : good 
seasons and bad follow each other as of 
old. The dumb multitudes are no more 
concerned with us than is the old horse 
peering through the rusty gate of the 
village pound. The ancient map-makers 
wrote across unexplored regions, ' Here 
are lions.' Across the villages of fisher- 
men and turners of the earth, so different 
are these from us, we can write but 
one line that is certain, ' Here are 
ghosts.' 

My ghosts inhabit the village of H , 

in Leinster. History has in no manner 
been burdened by this ancient village, 
with its crooked lanes, its old abbey 
churchyard full of long grass, its green 
background of small fir-trees, and its 
quay, where lie a few tarry fishing-luggers. 
In the annals of entomology it is well 



Village Ghosts. 31 

known. For a small bay lies westward a 
little, where he who watches night after 
night may see a certain rare moth flutter- 
ing along the edge of the tide, just at the 
end of evening or the beginning of dawn. 
A hundred years ago it was carried here 
from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of silks 
and laces. If the moth-hunter would 
throw down his net, and go hunting for 
ghost tales or tales of the faeries and 
such-like children of Lillith, he would 
have need for far less patience. 

To approach the village at night a 
timid man requires great strategy. A 
man was once heard complaining, ' By 
the cross of Jesus ! how shall I go ? If I 
pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain 
Burney may look out on me. If I go 
round by the water, and up by the steps, 
there is the headless one and another on 
the quays, and a new one under the old 



32 The Celtic Twilight. 

churchyard wall. If I go right round the 
other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at 
Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in 
the Hospital Lane.' 

I never heard which spirit he braved, 
but feel sure it was not the one in the 
Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed 
had been there set up to receive patients. 
When the need had gone by, it was pulled 
down, but ever since the ground where 
it stood has broken out in ghosts and 
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at 

H , Paddy B by name — a man 

of great strength, and a teetotaller. His 
wife and sister-in-law, musing on his great 
strength, often wonder what he would do 
if he drank. One night when passing 
through the Hospital Lane, he saw what 
he supposed at first to be a tame rabbit ; 
after a little he found that it was a white 
cat. When he came near, the creature 



Village Ghosts. 33 

slowly began to swell larger and larger, 
and as it grew he felt his own strength 
ebbing away, as though it were sucked 
out of him. He turned and ran. 

By the Hospital Lane goes the ' Faeries' 
Path,' Every evening they travel from the 
hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. 
At the sea end of their path stands a cot- 
tage. One night Mrs, Arbunathy, who 
lived there, left her door open, as she was 
expecting her son. Her husband was 
asleep by the fire; a tall man came in 
and sat beside him. After he had been 
sitting there for a while, the woman said, 
' In the name of God, who are you ? ' 
He got up and went out, saying, ' Never 
leave the door open at this hour, or evil 
may come to you.' She woke her hus- 
band and told him, ' One of the good 
people has been with us,' said he. 

Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart 



34 The Celtic Twilight. 

at Hillside Gate. When she lived she 
was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. 
' Her ghost was never known to harm 
any one,' say the village people ; ' it is 
only doing a penance upon the earth.' 
Not far from Hillside Gate, where she 
haunted, appeared for a short time a 
much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt 
was the bogeen, a green lane leading from 
the western end of the village. I quote 
its history at length : a typical village 
tragedy. In a cottage at the village end 
of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim 
Montgomery, and his wife. They had 
several children. He was a little dandy, 
and came of a higher class than his 
neighbours. His wife was a very big 
woman. Her husband, who had been 
expelled from the village choir for drink, 
gave her a beating one day. Her sister 
heard of it, and came and took down one 



Village Ghosts. 35 

of the window shutters — Montgomery was 
neat about everything, and had shutters 
on the outside of every window — and beat 
him with it, being big and strong like her 
sister. He threatened to prosecute her; 
she answered that she would break every 
bone in his body if he did. She never 
spoke to her sister again, because she had 
allowed herself to be beaten by so small a 
man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and 
worse : his wife soon began to have not 
enough to eat. She told no one, for she 
was very proud. Often, too, she would 
have no fire on a cold night. If any 
neighbours came in she would say she had 
let the fire out because she was just going 
to bed. The people about often heard 
her husband beating her, but she never 
told any one. She got very thin. At last 
one Saturday there was no food in the 
house for herself and the children. She 



$6 The Celtic Twilight. 

could bear it no longer, and went to the 
priest and asked him for some money. 
He gave her thirty shillings. Her hus- 
band met her, and took the money, and 
beat her. On the following Monday she 
got very ill, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. 
Mrs. Kelly, as soon as she saw her, said, 
* My woman, you are dying,' and sent for 
the priest and the doctor. She died in 
ah hour. After her death, as Montgomery 
neglected the children, the landlord had 
them taken to the workhouse. A few 
nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly 
was going home through the bogeen 
when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery 
appeared and followed her. It did not 
leave her until she reached her own 

house. She told the priest, Father S , 

a noted antiquarian, and could not get 
him to believe her. A few nights after- 
wards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in 



Village Ghosts. '^y 

the same place. She was in too great 
terror to go the whole way, but stopped at 
a neighbour's cottage midway, and asked 
them to let her in. They answered they 
were going to bed. She cried out, ' In 
the name of God let me in, or I will break 
open the door.' They opened, and so 
she escaped from the ghost. Next day 
she told the priest again. This time he 
believed, and said it would follow her 
until she spoke to it. The third time she 
met the spirit in the bogeen as before. 
She asked what kept it from its rest. The 
spirit said that its children must be taken 
from the workhouse, for none of its re- 
lations were ever there before, and that 
three masses were to be said for the repose 
of its soul. ' If my husband does not 
beUeve you,' she said, ' show him that,' 
and touched Mrs. Kelly's wrist with three 
fingers. The places where they touched 



38 The Celtic Twilight. 

swelled up and blackened. She then 
vanished. For a time Montgomery would 
not believe that his wife had appeared : 
'she would not show herself to Mrs. 
Kelly,' he said — ' she with respectable 
people to appear to.' He was convinced 
by the three marks, and the children were 
taken from the workhouse. The priest 
said the masses, and the shade must 
have been at rest, for it has not since 
appeared. Some time afterwards Jim 
Montgomery died in the workhouse, 
having come to great poverty through 
drink. 

I know some who believe they have 
seen the headless ghost upon the quay, and 
one who, when he passes the old cemetery 
wall at night, sees a woman with white 
borders to her cap creep out and follow 
him. The apparition only leaves him 
at his own door. The villagers imagine 



Village Ghosts. 39 

she must follow him to avenge some 
wrong. 

' I will haunt you when I die ' is a 
favourite threat. His wife was once half- 
scared to death by what she considers a 
demon in the shape of a dog. These are 
a few of the open-air spirits ; the more 
domestic of their tribe gather within- 
doors, plentiful as swallows under south- 
ern eaves. 

One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching 
by her dying child in Fluddey's Lane. 
Suddenly there was a sound of knocking 
heard at the door. She did not open, 
fearing it was some unhuman thing that 
knocked. The knocking ceased. After 
a little the front-door and then the back- 
door were burst open, and closed again. 
Her husband went to see what was wrong. 
He found both doors bolted. The child 
died. The doors were again opened and 



40 The Celtic Twilight. 

closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan 
remembered that she had forgotten to 
leave window or door open, as the custom 
is, for the departure of the soul. These 
strange openings and closings and knock- 
ings were warnings and reminders from 
the spirits who attend the dying. 

The house ghost is usually a harmless 
and well-meaning creature. It is put up 
with as long as possible. It brings good 
luck to those who live with it. I re- 
member two children who slept with their 
mother and sisters and brothers in one 
small room. In the room was also a 
ghost. They sold herrings in the Dublin 
streets, and did not mind the ghost much, 
because they knew they would always, sell 
their fish easily while they slept in the 
' ha'nted ' room. 

I have some acquaintance among the 
ghost-seers of western villages. The Con- 



Village Ghosts. 41 

naught tales are very diiferent from those 

of Leinster. These H spirits have 

a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them. 
They come to announce a death, to fulfil 
some obligation, to revenge a wrong, to 
pay their bills even — as did a fisherman's 
daughter the other day — and then hasten 
to their rest. All things they do decently 
and in order. It is demons, and not 
ghosts, that transform themselves into 
white cats or black dogs. The people 
who tell the tales are poor, serious- 
minded fishing people, who find in the 
doings of the ghosts the fascination of 
fear. In the western tales is a whimsical 
grace, a curious extravagance. The people 
who recount them live in the most wild 
and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever 
loaded and fantastic with flying clouds. 
They are farmers and labourers, who do a 
little fishing now and then. They do not 



42 TJie Celtic Twilight. 

fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic 
and humorous pleasure in their doings. 
The ghosts themselves share in their 
quaint hilarity. In one western town, on 
whose deserted wharf the grass grows, 
these spirits have so much vigour that, 
when a misbeliever ventured to sleep in a 
haunted house, I have been told they 
flung him through the window, and his 
bed after him. In the surrounding villages 
the creatures use the most strange dis- 
guises. A dead old gentleman robs the 
cabbages of his own garden in the shape 
of a large rabbit. A wicked sea-captain 
stayed for years inside the plaster of a 
cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe, 
making the most horrible noises. He 
was only dislodged when the wall was 
broken down ; then out of the solid plaster 
the snipe rushed away whistling. 



A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP. 



A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP. 

Away to the north of Ben Bulben and 
Cope's mountain lives 'a strong farmer,' 
a knight of the sheep they would have 
called him in the Gaelic days. Proud of 
his descent from one of the most fighting 
clans of the Middle Ages, he is a man of 
force alike in his words and in his deeds. 
There is but one man that swears like 
him, and this man lives far away upon 
the mountain. ' Father in heaven, what 
have I done to deserve this ? ' he says 
when he has lost his pipe ; and no man 
but he who lives on the mountain can 
rival his language on a fair day over a 



46 The Celtic Twilight. 

bargain. He is passionate and abrupt in 
his movements, and when angry tosses 
his white beard about with his left hand. 

One day I was dining with him when 
the servant-maid announced a certain Mr. 
O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon 
the old man and upon his two daughters. 
At last the eldest daughter said somewhat 
severely to her father, 'Go and ask him 
to come in and dine.' The old man went 
out, and then came in looking greatly 
relieved, and said, ' He says he will not 
dine with us.' ' Go out,' said the daugh- 
ter, ' and ask him into the back parlour, 
and give him some whiskey.' Her father, 
who had just finished his dinner, obeyed 
sullenly, and I heard the door of the 
back parlour — a little room where the 
daughters sat and sewed during the even- 
ing — shut to behind the men. The 
daughter then turned to me and said, 



A Knight of the Sheep. 47 

' Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and 
last year he raised our taxes, and my 
father was very angry, and when he came, 
brought him into the dairy, and sent the 
dairy-woman away on a message, and then 
swore at him a great deal. "I will teach 
you, sir," O'Donnell replied, " that the law 
can protect its officers ; " but my father 
reminded him that he had no witness. 
At last my father got tired, and sorry too, 
and said he would show him a short way 
home. When they were half-way to the 
main road they came on a man of my 
father's who was ploughing, and this 
somehow brought back remembrance of 
the wrong. He sent the man away on a 
message, and began to swear at the tax- 
gatherer again. When I heard of it I 
was disgusted that he should have made 
such a fuss over a 'miserable creature 
like O'Donnell ; and when I heard a few 



48 The Celtic Twilight. 

weeks ago that O'Donnell's only son had 
died and left him heart-broken, I resolved 
to make him be kind to him next time he 
came.' 

She then went out to see a neighbour, 
and I sauntered towards the back par- 
lour. When I came to the door I heard 
angry voices inside. The two men were 
evidently getting on to the tax again, for 
I could hear them bandying figures to 
and fro. I opened the door ; at sight of 
my face the farmer was reminded of his 
peaceful intentions, and asked me if I 
knew where the whiskey was. I had 
seen him put it into the cupboard, and 
was able therefore to find it and get it 
out, looking at the thin, grief-struck face 
of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older 
than my friend, and very much more 
feeble and worn, and of a very different 
type. He was not like him, a robust. 



A Knight of the Sheep. 49 

successful man, but rather one of those 
whose feet find no resting-place upon the 
earth, I recognized one of the children 
of revery, and said, ' You are doubtless of 
the stock of the old O'Donnells. I know 
well the hole in the river where their 
treasure lies buried under the guard of a 
serpent with many heads.' ' Yes, sur,' 
he replied, ' I am the last of a line of 
princes.' 

We then fell to talking of many com- 
monplace things, and my friend did not 
once toss his beard about with his left 
hand, but was very friendly. At last the 
gaunt old tax-gatherer got up to go, and 
my friend said, 'I hope we will have a 
glass together next year.' 'No, no,' was 
the answer, 'I shall be dead next year,' 
'I too have lost sons,' said the other, 
in quite a gentle voice, ' But your sons 
were not like my son.' And then the 



50 TJie Celtic Twilight. 

two men parted, with an angry flush and 
bitter hearts, and had I not cast between 
them some common words or other, 
might not have parted, but have fallen 
rather into an angry discussion of the 
value of their dead sons. If I had not 
pity for all the children of revery I should 
have let them fight it out, and would now 
have many a wonderful oath to record. 

The knight of the sheep would have 
had the victor)', for no soul that wears 
this garment of blood and clay can surpass 
him. He was but once beaten ; and this 
is his tale of how it was. He and some 
farm hands were playing at cards in a 
small cabin that stood against the end 
of a big barn. A wicked woman had 
once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one 
of the players threw down an ace and 
began to swear without any cause. His 
swearing was so dreadful that the others 



A Knight of the Sheep. 5 1 

stood up, and my friend said, ' All is not 
right here ; there is a spirit in him.' 
They ran to the door that led into the 
barn to get away as quickly as possible. 
The wooden bolt would not move, so the 
knight of the sheep took a saw which 
stood against the wall near at hand, and 
sawed through the bolt, and at once the 
door flew open with a bang, as though 
some one had been holding it, and they 
fled through. 



THE SORCERERS. 



THE SORCERERS. 

In Ireland we hear but little of the 
darker powers, and come across any who 
have seen them even more rarely, for the 
imagination of the people dwells rather 
upon the fantastic and capricious, and 
fantasy and caprice would lose the freedom 
which is their breath of life were they to 
unite them either with evil or with good. 
And yet the wise are of opinion, that wher- 
ever man is, the dark powers, who feed 
his rapacities ; no less than the bright 
beings, who store their honey in the cells 
of his heart ; and the twilight beings who 
flit hither and thither ; encompass him 



56 The Celtic Twilight. 

with their passionate and melancholy mul- 
titude. They hold, too, that he who by 
long desire or through accident of birth 
possesses the power of piercing into their 
hidden abode can see them there, those 
who were once men or women full of a 
terrible vehemence, and those who have 
never lived upon the earth, moving slowly 
and with a subtler malice. The dark 
powers cling about us, it is said, day and 
night, like bats upon an old tree ; and 
that we do not hear more of them is 
merely because the darker kinds of magic 
have been but little practised. I have 
indeed come across very few persons in 
Ireland who try to communicate with 
evil powers, and the few I have met keep 
their purpose and practice wholly hidden 
from the inhabitants of the remote town 
where they live. It is even possible, 
though this is perhaps scarcely likely, that 



The Sorcerers. 57 

their lives will leave no record in the 
folklore of the district. They are mainly 
small clerks and the like, and meet for 
the purpose of their art in a room hung 
with black hangings. They would not 
admit me into this room, but finding 
me not altogether ignorant of the arcane 
science, showed gladly elsewhere what 
they would do. ' Come to us,' said their 
leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill, 'and 
we will show you spirits who will talk to 
you face to face, and in shapes as solid 
and heavy as our own.' 

I had been talking of the power of 
communicating in states of trance with the 
angelical and faery beings, — the children 
of the day and of the twilight, — and he 
had been contending that we should only 
believe in what we can see and feel when 
in our ordinary everyday state of mind. 
' Yes,' I said, ' I will come to you,' or 



58 The Celtic Tivilight. 

some such words ; ' but I will not permit 
myself to become entranced, and will there- 
fore know whether these shapes you talk 
of are any the more to be touched and 
felt by the ordinary senses than are those 
I talk of.' I was not denying the power 
of other beings to take upon themselves 
a clothing of mortal substance, but only 
that simple invocations, such as -he spoke 
of, seemed unlikely to do more than cast 
the mind into trance and thereby bring it 
into the presence of the powers of day, 
twilight, and darkness. 

' But,' he said, ' we have seen them 
move the furniture hither and thither, and 
they go at our bidding, and help or harm 
people who know nothing of them.' I am 
not giving the exact words, but as accu- 
rately as I can the substance of our talk. 

On the night arranged I turned up 
about eight, and found the leader sitting 



The Sorcerers. 59 

alone in almost total darkness in a small 
back room. He was dressed in a black 
gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old 
drawing, that left nothing of him visible 
except his eyes, which peered out through 
two small round holes. Upon the table 
in front of him was a brass dish of burning 
herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with 
painted symbols, two crossed daggers, 
and certain implements shaped like quern 
stones, which were used to control the 
elemental powers in some fashion I did 
not discover. I also put on a black gown, 
and remember that it did not fit perfectly, 
and that it impeded my movements con- 
siderably. The sorcerer then took a black 
cock out of a basket, and cut its throat 
with . one of the daggers, letting the blood 
fall into the large bowl. He then opened 
a book and began an invocation, which 
was certainly not English, and had a deep 



6o TJie Celtic Twilight. 

guttural sound. Before he had finished, 
another of the sorcerers, a man of about 
twenty-five, came in, and having put on 
a black gown also, seated himself at my 
left hand. I had the invoker directly in 
front of me, and soon began to find his 
eyes, which glittered through the small 
holes in his hood, affecting me in a curious 
way. I struggled hard against their 
influence, and my head began to ache. 
The invocation continued, and nothing 
happened for the first few minutes. Then 
the invoker got up and extinguished the 
light in the hall, so that no glimmer might 
come through the slit under the door. 
There was now no light except from the 
herbs on the brass dish, and no sound 
except from the deep guttural murmur of 
the invocation. 

Presently the man at my left swayed 
himself about, and cried out, ' O god ! O 



The Sorcerers. 6i 

god ! ' I asked him what ailed him, but he 
did not know he had spoken. A moment 
after he said he could see a great serpent 
moving about the room, and became con- 
siderably excited. I saw nothing with 
any definite shape, but thought that black 
clouds were forming about me. I felt 
I must fall into a trance if I did not 
struggle against it, and that the influence 
which was causing this trance was out of 
harmony with itself, in other words, evil. 
After a struggle I got rid of the black 
clouds, and was able to observe with my 
ordinary senses again. The two sorcerers 
now began to see black and white columns 
moving about the room, and finally a man 
in a monk's habit, and they became greatly 
puzzled because I did not see these things 
also, for to them they were as solid as the 
table before them. The invoker appeared 
to be gradually increasing in pov/er, and I 



62 The Celtic Twilight. 

began to feel as if a tide of darkness was j 
pouring from him and concentrating itself 
about me ; and now too I noticed that the 
man on my left hand had passed into a 
death-like trance. With a last great effort 
I drove off the black clouds, but feeling 
them to be the only shapes I should see 
without passing into a trance, and having 
no great love for them, I asked for lights, 
and after the needful exorcism returned 
to the ordinary world. 

I said to the more powerful of the two 
sorcerers — ' What would happen if one of 
your spirits had overpowered me ? ' ' You 
would go out of this room,' he answered, 
' with his character added to your own.' 
I asked about the origin of his sorcery, 
but got little of importance, except that 
he had learned it from his father. He 
would not tell me more, for he had, it 
appeared, taken a vow of secrecy. 



The Sorcerers. ^i 

For some days I could not get over the 
feeling of having a number of deformed 
and grotesque figures lingering about me. 
The Bright Powers are always beautiful 
and desirable, and the Dim Powers are 
now beautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but 
the Dark Powers express their unbalanced 
natures in shapes of ugliness and horror. 



THE LAST GLEEMAN. 



THE LAST GLEEMAN. 

Michael Moran was born about 1794 
off Black Pitts, in the Liberties of Dub- 
lin, in Faddle Alley. A fortnight after 
birth he went stone blind from illness, 
and became thereby a blessing to his 
parents, who were soon able to send him 
to rhyme and beg at street corners and 
at the bridges over the Liffey. They 
may well have wished that their quiver 
were full of such as he, for, free from the 
interruption of sight, his mind became 
a perfect echoing chamber, where every 
movement of the day and every change 



68 The Celtic Twilight. 

of public passion whispered itself into 
rhyme or quaint saying. By the time he 
had grown to manhood he was the ad- 
mitted rector of all the ballad-mongers 
of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver, 
Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, 
Martin from Meath, M'Bride from heaven 
knows where, and that M'Grane, who in 
after days, when the true Moran was no 
more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or 
rather in borrowed rags, and gave out 
that there had never been any Moran but 
himself, and many another, did homage 
before him, and held him chief of all 
their tribe. Nor despite his blindness 
did he find any difficulty in getting a 
wife, but rather was able to pick and ■ 
choose, for he was just that mixture of 
ragamuffin and of genius which is dear to 
the heart of woman, who, perhaps because 
she is wholly conventional herself, loves 



The Last Gleeman. 69 

the unexpected, the crooked, the bewilder- 
ing. Nor did he lack despite his rags 
many excellent things, for it is remem- 
bered that he ever loved caper sauce, 
going so far indeed in his honest indig- 
nation at its absence upon one occasion 
as to fling a leg of mutton at his wife. 
He was not, however, much to look at, 
with his coarse frieze coat with its cape 
and scalloped edge, his old corduroy 
trousers and great brogues, and his stout 
stick made fast to his wrist by a thong of 
leather : and he would have been a woe- 
ful shock to the gleeman MacConglinne 
could that friend of kings have beheld 
him in prophetic vision from the pillar 
stone at Cork. And yet though the short 
cloak and the leather wallet were no 
more, he was a true gleeman, being alike 
poet, jester, and newsman of the people. 
In the morning when he had finished his 



70 The Celtic Tivilight. 

breakfast, his wife or some neighbour 
would read the newspaper to him, and 
read on and on until he interrupted with, 
' That'll do — I have me meditations ; ' 
and from these meditations would come 
the day's store of jest and rhyme. He 
had the whole Middle Ages under his 
frieze coat. 

He had not, however, MacConglinne's 
hatred of the Church and clergy, for when 
the fruit of his meditations did not ripen 
well, or when the crowd called for some- 
thing more solid, he would recite or sing 
a metrical tale or ballad of saint or 
martyr or of Biblical adventure. He 
would stand at a street corner, and when 
a crowd had gathered would begin in 
some such fashion as follows (I copy the 
record of one who knew him) — ' Gather 
round me, boys, gather round me. Boys, 
am I standin' in puddle ? am I standin' in 



The Last Gleeman. 71 

wet?' Thereon several boys would cry, 
' Ah, no ! yez not ! yer in a nice dry 
place. Go on with St Mary ; go on with 
Moses ' — each calling for his favourite 
tale. Then Moran, with a suspicious 
wriggle of his body and a clutch at his 
rags, would burst out with ' All me 
buzzim friends are turned backbiters ; ' 
and after a final ' If yez don't drop your 
coddin' and deversion I'll lave some of 
yez a case,' by way of warning to the 
boys,' begin his recitation, or perhaps still 
delay, to ask, ' Is there a crowd around 
me now ? Any blackguard heretic around 
me ? ' The best-known of his religious 
tales was St Mary of Egypt, a long poem 
of exceeding solemnity, condensed from 
the much longer work of a certain Bishop 
Coyle. It told how a fast woman of 
Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims 
to Jerusalem for no good purpose, and 



72 The Celtic Twilight. 

then, turning penitent on finding herself 
withheld from entering the Temple by 
supernatural interference, fled to the desert 
and spent the remainder of her life in 
solitary penance. When at last she was 
at the point of death, God sent Bishop 
Zozimus to hear her confession, give her 
the last sacrament, and with the help of a 
lion, whom He sent also, dig h6r grave. 
The poem has the intolerable cadence of 
the eighteenth century, but was so popular 
and so often called for that Moran was 
soon nicknamed Zozimus, and by that 
name is he remembered. He had also 
a poem of his own called Moses, which 
went a Httle nearer poetry without going 
very near. But he could ill brook so- 
lemnity, and before long parodied his 
own verses in the following ragamuffin 
fashion : 



The Last G kern an. 73 

In Egypt's land, contagious to the Nile, 
King Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in style. 
She tuk her dip, then walked unto the land, 
To dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand. 
A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw 
A smiling babby in a wad o' straw. 
She tuk it up, and said with accents mild, 
' 'Tare-and-agers, girls, which av yez owns the 
child?' 

His humorous rhymes were, however, 
more often quips and cranks at the ex- 
pense of his contemporaries. It was his 
delight, for instance, to remind a certain 
shoemaker, noted ahke for display of 
wealth and for personal uncleanness, of his 
inconsiderable origin in a song of which 
but the first stanza has come down to us : 

At the dirty end of Dirty Lane, 
Liv'd a dirty cobbler, Dick Maclane ; 
His wife was in the old king's reign 

A stout brave orange-woman. 
On Essex Bridge she strained her throat. 
And six-a-penny was her note. 
But I>ikey wore a bran-new coat. 

He got among the yeomen. 



74 T^fi^ Celtic Twilight. 

He was a bij^ot, like his clan, 

And in the streets he wildly sang, 

O Roly, toly, toly raid, with his old jade. 

He had troubles of divers kinds, and 
numerous interlopers to face and put 
down. Once an officious peeler arrested 
him as a vagabond, but was triumphantly 
routed amid the laughter of the court, 
when Moran reminded his worship of the 
precedent set by Homer, who was also, 
he declared, a poet, and a blind man, 
and a beggarman. He had to face a 
more serious difficulty as his fame grew. 
Various imitators started up upon all 
sides. A certain actor, for instance, made 
as many guineas as Moran did shillings 
by mimicking his sayings and his songs 
and his get-up upon the stage. One 
night this actor was at supper with some 
friends, when dispute arose as to whether 
his mimicry was overdone or not. It 



TJie Last Gleeman. 75 

was agreed to settle it by an appeal to 
the mob. A forty-shilling supper at a 
famous coffee-house was to be the wager. 
The actor took up his station at Essex 
Bridge, a great haunt of Moran's, and 
soon gathered a small crowd. He had 
scarce got through ' In Egypt's land, con- 
tagious to the Nile,' when Moran himself 
came up, followed by another crowd. 
The crowds met in great excitement and 
laughter. ' Good Christians,' cried the 
pretender, ' is it possible that any man 
would mock the poor dark man like 
that ? ' 

'Who's that? It's some imposhterer,' 
replied Moran. 

' Begone, you wretch ! it's you'ze the 
imposhterer. Don't you fear the light of 
heaven being struck from your eyes for 
mocking the poor dark man ? ' 

'Saints and angels, is there no protec- 



^6 The Celtic TzviligJit. 

tion against this ? You're a most inhuman 
blaguard to try to deprive me of my 
honest bread this way,' repHed poor Moran. 

' And you, you wretch, won't let me go 
on with the beautiful poem. Christian 
people, in your charity won't you beat 
this man away? he's taking advantage 
of my darkness.' 

The pretender, seeing that -he was 
having the best of it, thanked the people 
for their sympathy and protection, and 
went on with the poem, Moran listening 
for a time in bewildered silence. After 
a while Moran protested again with : 

' Is it possible that none of yez can 
know me? Don't yez see it's myself; 
and that's some one else?' 

'Before I proceed any further in this 
lovely story,' interrupted the pretender, ' I 
call on yez to contribute your charitable 
donations to help me to go on.' 



TJie Last Gleeman. 'j'j 

' Have you no sowl to be saved, you 
mocker of heaven ? ' cried Moran, put 
completely beside himself by this last 
injury. 'Would you rob the poor as well 
as desave the world? O, was ever such 
wickedness known ? ' 

' I leave it to yourselves, my friends,' 
said the pretender, ' to give to the real 
dark man, that you all know so well, and 
save me from that schemer,' and with that 
he collected some pennies and half-pence. 
While he was doing so, Moran started 
his Mary of Egypt, but the indignant 
crowd seizing his stick were about to 
belabour him, when they fell back be- 
wildered anew by his close resemblance 
to himself. The pretender now called 
to them to 'just give him a grip of that 
villain, and he'd soon let him know who 
the imposhterer was ! ' They led him over ' 
to Moran, but instead of closing with him 



7S The Celtic Twilight. 

he thrust a few shilHngs into his hand, 
and turning to the crowd explained to 
them he was indeed but an actor, and 
that he had just gained a wager, and so 
departed amid much enthusiasm, to eat 
the supper he had won. 

In April 1846 word was sent to the 
priest that Michael Moran was dying. 
He found him at 15 (now 14J). Patrick 
Street, on a straw bed, in a room full of 
raggad ballad-singers come to cheer his 
last moments. After his death the ballad- 
singers, with many fiddles and the like, 
came again and gave him a fine wake, 
each adding to the merriment whatever 
he knew in the way of rann, tale, old 
saw, or quaint rhyme. He had had his 
day, had said his prayers and made his 
confession, and why should they not give 
him a hearty send-off? The funeral took 
place the next day. A good party of 



The Last Gleemati. 79 

his admirers and friends got into the 
hearse with the coffin, for the day was 
wet and nasty. They had not gone far 
when one of them burst out with ' It's 
cruel cowld, isn't it ? ' ' Garra',' rephed 
another, 'we'll all be as stiff as the 
corpse when we get to the berrin-ground.' 
' Bad cess to him,' said a third ; ' I 
wish he'd held out another month until 
the weather got dacent.' A man called 
Carroll thereupon produced a half-pint 
of whiskey, and they all drank to the 
soul of the departed. Unhappily, how- 
ever, the hearse was over-weighted, and 
they had not reached the cemetery be- 
fore the spring broke, and the bottle 
with it. 

Moran must have felt strange and out 
of place in that other kingdom he was 
entering, perhaps while his friends were 
drinking in his honour. Let us hope 



8o The Celtic Twilight. 

that some kindly middle region was 
found for him, where he can call dis- 
hevelled angels about him with some 
new and more rhythmical form of his 
old 

Gather round me, boys, will yez 

Gather round me ? 
And hear what I have to say 

Before ould Salley brings me 
My bread and jug of tay ; 

and fling outrageous quips and cranks 
at cherubim and seraphim. Perhaps he 
may have found and gathered, ragamuffin 
though he be, the Lily of High Truth, 
the Rose of Far-sight Beauty, for whose 
lack so many of the writers of Ireland, 
whether famous or forgotten, have been 
futile as the blown froth upon the shore. 



REGINA, REGINA 
PIGMEORUM, VENI. 



REGINA, REGINA PIGJIEORUM, 
VENI. / 

One night a middle-ag4d man, who had 
hved all his life far frony the noise of cab- 
wheels, a young girl, a relative of his, who 
was reported to be enough of a seer to 
catch a glimpse of unaccountable Hghts 
moving over the fields among the cattle^- 
and myself were walking along a far 
western sandy shore. We talked of the 
Dinny Math or faery people, and came in 
the midst of our talk to a notable haunt 
of theirs, a shallow cave amid black rocks, 
with its reflection under it in the wet sea 
sand. I asked the young girl if she could 



84 The Celtic Twilight. 

see anything, for I had quite a number 
of things to ask the Dinny Math. She 
stood still for a few minutes, and I saw 
that she was passing into a kind of waking 
trance, in which the cold sea breeze no 
longer troubled her, nor the dull boom of 
the sea distracted her attention. I then 
called aloud the names of the great 
faeries, and in a moment or two she said 
that she could hear music far inside the 
rocks, and then a sound of confused talk- 
ing, and of people stamping their feet as if 
to applaud some unseen performer. Up 
to this my other friend had been walking 
to and fro some yards off, but now he 
passed close to us, and as he did so said 
suddenly that we were going to be inter- 
rupted, for he heard the laughter of 
children somewhere beyond the rocks. 
We were however quite alone. The spirits 
of the place had begun to cast their in- 



Regina,Regina Pigmeorum, Vent. 85 

fluence over him also. In a moment he 
was corroborated by the girl, who said that 
bursts of laughter had begun to mingle 
with the music, the confused talking, and 
the noise of feet. She next saw a bright 
'light streaming out of the cave, which 
seemed to have grown much deeper, and 
a quantity of little people, in various 
coloured dresses, red predominating, 
dancing to a tune which she did not 
recognize. 

I then bade her call out to the queen of 
the little people to come and talk with us. 
There was, however, no answer to her 
command. I therefore repeated the words 
aloud myself, and in a moment a very 
beautiful tall woman came out of the cave. 
I too had by this time fallen into a kind 
of trance, in which what we call the 
unreal had begun to take upon itself a 
masterful reality, and was able to see the 



86 The Celtic Twilight. 

faint gleam of golden ornaments, the 
shadowy blossom of dim hair. I then 
bade the girl tell this tall queen to mar- 
shal her followers according to their 
natural divisions, that we might see them. 
I found as before that I had to repeat 
the command myself. The creatures then 
came out of the cave, and drew them- 
selves up, if I remember rightly, in four 
bands. One of these bands carried 
quicken boughs in their hands, and 
another had necklaces made apparently of 
serpents' scales, but their dress I cannot 
remember, for I was quite absorbed in 
that gleaming woman. I asked her to 
tell the seer whether these caves were the 
greatest faery haunts in the neighbour- 
hood. Her lips moved, but the answer 
was inaudible. I bade the seer lay her 
hand upon the breast of the queen, and 
after that she heard every word quite 



Regina,Regina Pigmeorum, Vent, ^y 

distinctly. No, this was not the greatest 
faery haunt, for there was a greater one 
a Httle further ahead. I then asked her 
whether it was true that she and her 
people carried away mortals, and if so, 
whether they put another soul in the 
place of the one they had taken ? ' We 
change the bodies,' was her answer. ' Are 
any of you ever born into mortal life?' 
' Yes.' 'Do I know any who were 
among the Dinny Math before birth ? ' 
'You do.' 'Who are they?' 'It would 
not be lawful for you to know.' I then 
asked whether she and her people were 
not ' dramatizations of our moods ' ? ' She 
does not understand,' said my friend, 
'but says that her people are much like 
human beings^ and do most of the things 
human beings do.' I asked her other 
questions, as to her nature, and her pur- 
pose in the universe, but only seemed to 



88 The Celtic Twilight. 

puzzle her. At last she appeared to lose 
patience, for she wrote upon the sands 
— the sands of vision, not the grating 
sands under our feet — this message for 
me — ' Be careful, and do not seek to 
know too much about us.' Seeing that 
I had offended her, I thanked her for 
what she had shown and told, and let her 
depart again into her cave. In a little 
while the young girl awoke out of her 
trance, and felt again the cold wind of the 
world, and began to shiver. 

I tell these things as accurately as I 
can, and with no theories to blurr the 
record. Theories are poor things at the 
best, and the bulk of mine have perished 
long ago. I love better than any theory 
the sound of the Gate of Horn swinging 
upon its hinges, and hold that he alone 
who has passed the rose-strewn threshold 
can catch the far glimmer of the Ivory 



Regina, Regina Pigmeoriim, Vent. 89 

Gate. It were perhaps well for us all if we 
would but raise the cry Lilly the astrolo- 
ger raised in Windsor Forest, "Regina, 
Regina Pigmeorum, Veni," and remember 
with him, that God visiteth His children 
in dreams. Tall, glimmering queen, come 
near, and let me see again the shadowy 
blossom of thy dim hair. 



KIDNAPPERS. 



KIDNAPPERS. 

A LITTLE north of the town of Sligo, on 
the southern side of Ben Bulben, some 
hundreds of feet above the plain, is a 
small white square in the limestone. No 
mortal has ever touched it with his hand ; 
no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass 
beside it. There is no more inaccessible 
place on the planet, and few more encircled 
by awe to the deep considering. It is the 
door of faery-land. In the middle of night 
it swings open, and the unearthly troop 
rush out. All night the gay rabble sweep 
to and fro across the land, invisible to all, 
unless perhaps where, in some more than 



94 The Celtic Twilight. 

commonly ' gentle ' place — Drumclifif or 
Drum-a-hair — the night-capped heads of 
faery-doctors may be thrust from their 
doors to see what mischief the * gentry ' 
are doing. To their trained eyes and 
ears the fields are covered by red-hatted 
riders, and the air is full of shrill voices 
— a sound like whistling, as an ancient 
Scottish seer has recorded, and wholly 
different from the talk of the angels, who 
' speak much in the throat, like the Irish,' 
as Lilly, the astrologer, has wisely said. 
If there be a new-born baby or new-wed 
bride in the neighbourhood, the night- 
capped ' doctors ' will peer with more 
than common care, for the unearthly 
troop do not always return empty-handed. 
Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born 
baby goes with them into their mountains ; 
the door swings to behind, and the new- 
born or the new-wed moves henceforth 



Kidnappers. 95 

in the bloodless land of Faery ; happy 
enough, but doomed to melt out at the 
last judgment like bright vapour, for the 
soul cannot live without sorrow. Through 
this door of white stone, and the other 
doors of that land where geabheadh tii an 
sonas aer pighin ('you can buy joy for a 
penny'), have gone kings, queens, and 
princes, but so greatly has the power of 
Faery dwindled, that there are none but 
peasants in these sad chronicles of mine. 

Somewhere about the beginning of this 
century appeared at the western corner of 
Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher's 
shop now is, not a palace, as in Keats' s 
Lamia, but an apothecary's shop, ruled 
over by a certain unaccountable Dr. 
Open don. Where he came from, none 
ever knew. There also was in Sligo, in 
those days, a woman, Ormsby by name, 
whose husband had fallen mysteriously 



96 The Celtic Twilight. 

sick. The doctors could make nothing of 
him. Nothing seemed wrong with him, 
yet weaker and weaker he grew. Away 
went the wife to Dr. Opendon. She was 
shown into the shop parlour. A black 
cat was sitting straight up before the fire. 
She had just time to see that the side- 
board was covered with fruit, and to 
say to herself, ' Fruit must be wholesome 
when the doctor has so much,' before Dr. 
Opendon came in. He was dressed all 
in black, the same as the cat, and his wife 
walked behind him dressed in black like- 
wise. She gave him a guinea, and got a 
little bottle in return. Her husband re- 
covered that time. Meanwhile the black 
doctor cured many people; but one day 
a rich patient died, and cat, wife, and 
doctor all vanished the night after. In a 
year the man Ormsby fell sick once more. 
Now he was a good-looking man, and his 



Kidnappers. 97 

wife felt sure the ' gentry ' were coveting 
him. She went and called on the * faery- 
doctor ' at Cairnsfoot. As soon as he had 
heard her tale, he went behind the back 
door and began muttering, muttering, 
muttering — making spells. Her husband 
got well this time also. But after a while 
he sickened again, the fatal third time, 
and away went she once more to Cairns- 
foot, and out went the faery-doctor behind 
his back door and began muttering, but 
soon he came in and told her it was no 
use — her husband would die ; and sure 
enough the man died, and ever after when 
she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook 
her head saying she knew well where he 
was, and it wasn't in heaven or hell or 
purgatory either. She probably believed 
that a log of wood was left behind in his 
place, but so bewitched that it seemed the 
dead body of her husband. 



98 The Celtic Twilight. 

She is dead now herself, but many still 
living remember her. She was, I believe, 
for a time a servant or else a kind of 
pensioner of some relations of my own. 

Sometimes those who are carried off are 
allowed after many years — seven usually 
—a final glimpse of their friends. Many 
years ago a woman vanished suddenly 
from a Sligo garden where she was walking 
with her husband. When her son, who 
was then a baby, had grown up he received 
word in some way, not handed down, that 
his mother was glamoured by faeries, and 
imprisoned for the time in a house in 
Glasgow and longing to see him. Glas- 
gow in those days of sailing-ships seemed 
to the peasant mind almost over the verge 
of the known world, yet he, being a duti- 
ful son, started away. For a long time 
he walked the streets of Glasgow ; at 
last down in a cellar he saw his mother 



Kidnappers. 99 

working. She was happy, she said, and 
had the best of good eating, and would 
he not eat? and therewith laid all kinds 
of food on the table ; but he, knowing 
well that she was trying to cast on him 
the glamour by giving him faery food, 
that she might keep him with her, 
refused and came home to his people in 
Sligo. 

Some five miles southward of Sligo is a 
gloomy and tree-bordered pond, a great 
gathering-place of water-fowl, called, be- 
cause of its form, the Heart Lake. It is 
haunted by stranger things than heron, 
snipe, or wild duck. Out of this lake, 
as from the white square stone in Ben 
Bulben, issues an unearthly troop. Once 
men began to drain it; suddenly one of 
them raised a cry that he saw his house 
in flames. They turned round, and every 
man there saw his own cottage burning. 



100 TJie Celtic Twilight. 

They hurried home to find it was but 
faery glamour. To this hour on the 
border of the lake is shown a half-dug 
trench — the signet of their impiety. A 
little way from this lake I heard a 
beautiful and mournful history of faery 
kidnapping. I heard it from a little 
old woman in a white cap, who sings 
to herself in Gaelic, and moves from 
one foot to the other as though she 
remembered the dancing of her youth. 

A young man going at nightfall to the 
house of his just married bride, met in 
the way a jolly company, and with them 
his bride. They were faeries, and had 
stolen her as a wife for the chief of 
their band. To him they seemed only a 
company of merry mortals. His bride, 
when she saw her old love, bade him 
welcome, but was most fearful lest he 
should eat the faery food, and so be 



Kidnappers. lOi 

glamoured out of the earth into that 
bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set 
him down to play cards with three of the 
cavalcade; and he played on, realizing 
nothing until he saw the chief of the band 
carrying his bride away in his arms. 
Immediately he started up, and knew that 
they were faeries ; for slowly all that jolly 
company melted into shadow and night. 
He hurried to the house of his beloved. 
As he drew near came to him the cry of 
the keeners. She had died some time 
before he came. Some noteless Gaelic 
poet had made this into a forgotten 
ballad, some odd verses of which my 
white-capped friend remembered and sang 
for me. 

Sometimes one hears of stolen people 
acting as good genii to the living, as in 
this tale, heard also close by the haunted 
pond, of John Kirwan of Castle Hacket. 



102 The Celtic Twilight. 

The Kirwans are a family much rumoured 
of in peasant lore, and believed to be 
the descendants of a man and a spirit. 
They have ever been famous for beauty, 
and I have read that the mother of 
the present Lord Cloncurry was of their 
tribe. 

John Kirwan was a great horse-racing 
man, and once landed in Liverpool with a 
fine horse, going racing somewhere in 
middle England. That evening, as he 
walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came 
up and asked where he was stabling his 
horse. In such and such a place, he 
answered. ' Don't put him there,' said 
the slip of a boy ; ' that stable will be 
burnt to-night.' He took his horse else- 
where, and sure enough the stable was 
burnt down. Next day the boy came 
and asked as reward to ride as his jockey 
in the coming race, and then was gone. 



Kidnappers. 103 

The race-time came round. At the last 
moment the boy ran forward and mounted, 
saying, ' If I strike him with the whip in 
my left hand I will lose, but if in my right 
hand bet all you are worth.' For, said 
Paddy Flynn, who told me the tale, ' the 
left arm is good for nothing. I might 
go on making the sign of the cross with 
it, and all that, come Christmas, and a 
Banshee, or such like, would no more 
mind than if it was that broom.' Well, 
the slip of a boy struck the horse with 
his right hand, and John Kirwan cleared 
the field out. When the race was over, 
MVhat can I do for you now?' said he. 
'■ Nothing but this,' said the boy : ' my 
mother has a cottage on your land — 
they stole me from the cradle. Be 
good to her, John Kirwan, and wherever 
your horses go I will watch that no ill 
follows them; but you will never see me 



104 The Celtic Twilight. 

more.' With that he made himself air, 
and vanished. 

Sometimes animals are carried off — 
apparently drowned animals more than 
others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy 
Flynn told me, lived a poor widow with 
one cow and its calf. The cow fell into 
the river, and was washed away. There 
was a man thereabouts who went to a 
red-haired woman — for such are supposed 
to be wise in these things — and she told 
him to take the calf down to the edge of 
the river, and hide himself and watch. He 
did as she had told him, and as evening 
came on the calf began to low, and after 
a while the cow came along the edge of 
the river and commenced suckling it. 
Then, as he had been told, he caught the 
cow's tail. Away they went at a great 
pace, across hedges and ditches, till they 
came to a royalty (a name for the little 



Kidnappers. 105 

circular ditches, commonly called raths or 
forts, with which Ireland is covered since 
Pagan times). Therein he saw walking 
or sitting all the people who had died out 
of his village in his time. A woman was 
sitting on the edge with a child on her 
knees, and she called out to him to mind 
what the red-haired woman had told him, 
and he remembered she had said, Bleed 
the cow. So he stuck his knife into the 
cow and drew blood. That broke the 
spell, and he was able to turn her home- 
ward. ' Do not forget the spancel,' said 
the woman with the child on her knees ; 
' take the inside one.' There were three 
spancels on a bush ; he took one, and 
the cow was driven safely home to the 
widow. 

There is hardly a valley or mountain- 
side where folk cannot tell you of some 
one pillaged from amongst them. Two 



io6 The Celtic TiviligJit. 

or three miles from the Heart Lake lives 
an old woman who was stolen away in 
her youth. After seven years she was 
brought home again for some reason or 
other, but she had no toes left. She had 
danced them off. Many near the white 
stone door in Ben Bulben have been 
stolen away. 

It is far easier to be sensible in cities 
than in many country places I could tell 
you of. When one walks on those grey 
roads at evening by the scented elder- 
bushes of the white cottages, watching the 
faint mountains gathering the clouds upon 
their heads, one all too readily discovers, 
beyond the thin cobweb veil of the 
senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurry- 
ing from the white square stone door to 
the north, or from the Heart Lake in the 
south. 



THE UNTIRING ONES. 



THE UNTIRING ONES. 

It is one of the great troubles of life 
that we cannot have any unmixed 
emotions. There is always something in 
our enemy that we like, and something in 
our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this 
entanglement of moods which makes us 
old, and puckers our brows and deepens 
the furrows about our eyes. If we could 
love and hate with as good heart as the 
faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived 
like them. But until that day their un- 
tiring joys and sorrows must ever be 
one-half of their fascination. Love with 
them never grows weary, nor can the 



1 10 The Celtic Tzvilight. 

circles of the stars tire out their dancing 
feet. The Donegal peasants remember 
this when they bend over the spade, or sit 
full of the heaviness of the fields beside 
the griddle at nightfall, and tell stories 
about it that it may not be forgotten. A 
short while ago, they say, two faeries, little 
creatures, one like a young man, one like 
a young woman, came to a farmer's house, 
and spent the night sweeping the hearth 
and setting all tidy. The next night they 
came again, and while the farmer was 
away, brought all the furniture up-stairs 
into one room, and having arranged it 
round the walls, for the greater grandeur 
it seems, they began to dance. They 
danced on and on, and days and days 
went by, and all the country side came to 
look at them, but still their feet never tired. 
The farmer did not dare to live at home 
the while ; and after three months he 



The Untiring Ones. 1 1 1 

made up his mind to stand it no more, 
and went and told them that the priest 
was coming. The httle creatures when 
they heard this went back to their own 
country, and there their joy shall last as 
long as the points of the rushes are 
brown, the people say, and that is until 
God shall burn up the world with a kiss. 

But it is not merely faeries who know 
untiring days, for there have been men 
and women who, falling under their en- 
chantment, have attained, perhaps by the 
right of their God-given spirits, an even 
more . than faery abundance of life and 
feeling. It seems that when mortals have 
gone amid those poor happy leaves of 
the Imperishable Rose of Beauty, blown 
hither and thither by the winds that 
awakened the stars, the dim kingdom 
has acknowledged their birthright, per- 
haps a little sadly, and given them of its 



112 The Celtic Twilight. 

best. Such a mortal was born long ago at 
a village in the south of Ireland. She 
lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat 
by rocking her, when a woman of the she 
(the faeries) came in, and said that the 
child was chosen to be the bride of the 
prince of the dim kingdom, but that as 
it would never do for his wife to grow old 
and die while he was still in the first 
ardour of his love, she would be gifted 
with a faery life. The mother was to take 
the glowing log out of the fire and bury it 
in the garden, and her child would live 
as long as it remained unconsumed. The 
mother buried the log, and the child grew 
up, became a beauty, and married the 
prince of the faeries, who came to her at 
nightfall. After seven hundred years the 
prince died, and another prince ruled 
in his stead and married the beautiful 
peasant girl in his turn ; and after another 



The Untiring Ones. 113 

seven hundred years he died also, and an- 
other prince and another husband, came 
in his stead, and so on until she had had 
seven husbands. At last one day the 
priest of the parish called upon her, and 
told her that she was a scandal to the 
whole neighbourhood with her seven hus- 
bands and her long life. She was very 
sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, 
and then she told him about the log, and 
he went straight out and dug until he 
found it, and then they burned it, and she 
died, and was buried like a Christian, and 
everybody was pleased. Such a mortal 
too was Clooth-na-bare, who went all over 
the world seeking a lake deep enough to 
drown her faery life, of which she had 
grown weary, leaping from hill to lake 
and lake to hill, and setting up a cairn of 
stones wherever her feet lighted, until at 
last she found the deepest water in the 



114 ^^^ Celtic Twilight. 

world in little Lough la, on the top of the 
Bird's Mountain at Sligo, 

The two little creatures may well dance 
on, and the woman of the log and Clooth- 
na-bare sleep in peace, for they have 
known untrammelled hate and unmixed 
love, and have never wearied themselves 
with ' yes ' and ' no,' or entangled their 
feet with the sorry net of ' maybe ' and 
* perhaps.' The great winds came and 
took them up into themselves. 



THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS. 



• THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS. 

There was a doubter in Donegal, and 
he would not hear of ghosts ; or. sheogues, 
and ; there , was . a : house .in Donegal ; that 
had been haunted: as long as man could 
remember, and. this is, the. story of • how 
the house got the : better ; of the : man. 
The man came into; the house. and lighted 
a - fire . in : the room under the haunted 
one, and took off his boots and set them 
on the hearth, and stretched : out his feet 
and ..warmed himself. . .• For , a . time . he 
prospered in his unbehef; but a.- little 
while after . the night . had ' fallen, and 
everything had got .very dark, one . of his 



1 1 8 TJie Celtic TiviligJit. 

boots began to move. It got up off the 
floor and gave a kind of slow jump 
towards the door, and then the other 
boot did the same, and after that the 
first boot jumped again. It thereupon 
dawned upon the man that an invisible 
being had got into his boots, and was 
now going away in them. When the 
boots reached the door they went up- 
stairs slowly, and then the man heard 
them go tramp, tramp round the haunted 
room over his head. A few minutes 
passed, and he could hear them again 
upon the stairs, and after that in the 
passage outside, and then one of them 
came in at the door, and the other gave 
a jump past it and came in too. They 
jumped along towards him, and then one 
got up and hit him, and afterwards the 
other hit him, then again the first hit 
him, and so on, until they drove him out 



The Man and his Boots. 1 19 

of the room, and finally out of the house. 
In this way he was kicked out by his 
own boots, and Donegal was avenged 
upon its doubter. It is not recorded 
whether the invisible being was a ghost 
or a sheogue, but the fantastic nature of 
the vengeance is like the work of the 
she who live in the heart of fantasy. 



A COWARD. 



A COWARD. 

One day I was at the house of my 
friend the strong farmer, who Hves beyond 
Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain, and 
met there a young lad who seemed to be 
dishked by the two daughters. I asked 
why they dishked him, and was told he 
was a coward. This interested me, for 
some whom robust children of nature 
take to be cowards are but men and 
women with a nervous system too finely 
made for their life and work. I looked 
at the lad; but no, that pink-and-white 
face and strong body had nothing of 



124 I^J^^ Celtic Twilight. 

undue sensibility. After a little he told 
me his story. He had lived a wild and 
reckless life, until one day, two years 
before, he was coming home late at night, 
and suddenly felt himself sinking in, as 
it were, upon the ghostly world. For 
a moment he saw the face of a dead 
brother rise up before him, and then he 
turned and ran. He did not stop till he 
came to a cottage nearly a mile down 
the road. He flung himself against the 
door with so much of violence that he 
broke the thick wooden bolt and fell 
upon the floor. From that day he gave 
up his wild life, but was a hopeless 
coward. . Nothing could ever bring him 
to look, either by day or night, upon the 
spot where he had seen the face, and he 
often went two miles round to avoid it; 
nor could, he said, 'the prettiest girl in 
the country ' persuade him to see her 



A Coward. 125 

home after a party if he were alone. He 
feared everything, for he had looked at 
the face no man can see unchanged — the 
imponderable face of a spirit. 



THE THREE O'BYRNES AND 
THE EVIL FAERIES. 



THE THREE O'BYRNES AND 
THE EVIL FAERIES. 

In the dim kingdom there is a great 
abundance of all excellent things. There 
is more love there than upon the earth ; 
there is more dancing there than upon 
the earth; and there is more treasure 
there than upon the earth. In the begin- 
ning the earth was perhaps made to fulfil 
the desire of man, but now it has got old 
and fallen into decay. What wonder 
if we try and pilfer the treasures of that 
other kingdom ! 



130 The Celtic Twilight. 

A friend was once at a village near 
Sleive League. One day he was straying 
about a rath called ' Cashel Nore.' A 
man with a haggard face and unkempt 
hair, and clothes falling in pieces, came 
into the rath and began digging. My 
friend turned to a peasant who was work- 
ing near and asked who the man was. 
'That is the third O'Byrne,' was the 
answer. A few days after he learned this 
story : A great quantity of treasure had 
been buried in the rath in pagan times, 
and a number of evil faeries set to guard 
it ; but some day it was to be found and 
belong to the family of the O'Byrnes. 
Before that day three O'Byrnes must find 
it and die. Two had already done so. 
The first had dug and dug until at last 
he got a glimpse of the stone coffin that 
contained it, but immediately a thing 
like a huge hairy dog came down the 



Three G Byrnes and Evil Faeries. 1 3 1 

mountain and tore him to pieces. The 
next morning the treasure had again 
vanished deep into the earth. The second 
O'Byrne came and dug and dug until he 
found the coffer, and Hfted the hd and 
saw the gold shining within. He saw 
some horrible sight the next moment, and 
went raving mad and soon died. The 
treasure again sank out of sight. The 
third O'Byrne is now digging. He be- 
lieves that he will die in some terrible 
way the moment he finds the treasure, 
but that the spell will be broken, and the 
O'Byrne family made rich for ever, and 
become again a great people, as they 
were of old. 

A peasant of the neighbourhood once 
saw the treasure. He found the shin- 
bone of a hare lying on the grass. He 
took it up ; there was a hole in it ; hie 
looked through the hole, and saw the 



132 The Celtic Twilight. 

gold heaped up under the ground. He 
hurried home to bring a spade, but when 
he got to the rath again he could not find 
the spot where he had seen it. 



DRUMCLIFF AND ROSSES. 



DRUMCLIFF AND ROSSES. 

Drumcliff and Rosses were, are, and 
ever shall be, please Heaven ! places of 
unearthly resort. I have lived near by 
them and in them, time after time, and 
have gathered thus many a crumb of 
faery lore. Drumcliff is a wide green 
valley, lying at the foot of Ben Bulben, 
the mountain in whose side the square 
white door swings open at nightfall to 
loose the faery riders on the world. The 
great St. Columba himself was the builder 
of many of the old ruins in the valley, 
climbed the mountains on one noted oc- 
casion to get near heaven with his prayers. 



136 The Celtic Twilight. 

Rosses is a little sea-dividing, sandy plain, 

covered with short grass, like a green 

table-cloth, and lying in the foam midway 

between the round cairn-headed Knock- 

narea and ' Ben Bulben, famous for 

hawks ' : 

' But for Benbulben and Knocknarea 
Many a poor sailor 'd be cast away,' 

as the rhyme goes. 

At the northern corner of Rosses is a 
little promontory of sand and rocks and 
grass : a mournful, haunted place. No 
wise peasant would fall asleep under its 
low cliff, for he who sleeps here may wake 
'silly,' the 'good people' having carried 
off his soul. There is no more ready 
short-cut to the dim kingdom than this 
plovery headland, for, covered and smoth- 
ered now from sight by mounds of sand, 
a long cave goes thither ' full of gold and 
silver, and the most beautiful parlours and 



Drumcliff and Rosses. 137 

drawing-rooms.' Once, before the sand 
covered it, a dog strayed in, and was heard 
yelping vainly deep underground in a fort 
far inland. These forts or raths, low 
circular ditches made before history began, 
cover all Rosses and all Columkille. The 
one where the dog yelped has, like most 
others, an underground beehive chamber 
in the midst. Once when I was poking 
about there, an unusually intelHgent and 
'reading' peasant who had come with 
me, and waited outside, knelt down by 
the opening, and whispered in a timid 
voice, ' Are you all right, sir ? ' I had 
been some little while underground, and 
he feared I had been carried off like the 
dog. 

No wonder he was afraid, for the 
fort has long been circled by ill-boding 
rumours. It is on the ridge of a small 
hill, on whose northern slope lie a few 



138 The Celtic Twilight. 

stray cottages. One night a farmer's 
young son came from one of them and 
saw the fort all flaming, and ran towards 
it, but the ' glamour ' fell on him, and he 
sprang on to a fence, cross-legged, and 
commenced beating it with a stick, for he 
imagined the fence was a horse, and that 
all night long he went on the most 
wonderful ride through the country. In 
the morning he was still beating his fence, 
and they carried him home, where he 
remained a simpleton for three years 
before he came to himself again. A little 
later a farmer tried to level the fort. His 
cows arxi horses died, and all manner of 
trouble overtook him, and finally he 
himself was led home, and left useless 
with 'his head on his knees by the fire 
to the day of his death.' 

A few hundred yards southwards of the 
northern angle of Rosses is another angle 



Drumcli-ff' and Rosses. 139 

having also its cave, though this one is 
not covered with sand. About twenty 
years ago a brig was wrecked near by, 
and three or four fishermen were put to 
watch the deserted hulk through the dark- 
ness. At midnight they saw sitting on a 
stone at the cave's mouth two red-capped 
fiddlers fiddling with all their might. 
The men fled. A great crowd of villagers 
rushed down to the cave to see the strange 
musicians, but the creatures had gone. 

To the wise peasant the green hills and 
woods round him are full of never-fading 
mystery. When the aged countrywoman 
stands at her door in the evening, and, 
in her own words, 'looks at the moun- 
tains and thinks of the goodness of God,' 
God is all the nearer, because the pagan 
powers are not far : because northward in 
Ben Bulben, famous for hawks, the white 
square door swings open at sundown, and 



I40 The Celtic Twilight, 

those wild unchristian riders rush forth 
upon the fields, while southward the 
White Lady still wanders under the broad 
cloud night-cap of Knocknarea. How 
may she doubt these things, even though 
the priest shakes his head at her? Did 
not a herd-boy, no long while since, see 
the White Lady? She passed so close 
that the skirt of her dress touched him. 
' He fell down, and was dead three days.' 
But this is merely the small gossip of 
faerydom — the little stitches that join this 
world and the other. 

One night as I sat eating Mrs. H 's 

soda-bread, her husband told me a longish 
story, much the best of all I heard 
in Rosses. Those creatures, the 'good 
people,' love to repeat themselves, and 
many a poor man from Fin M'Coul to 
our own days has happened on some such 
adventure. 



Drumcliff and Rossis. 141 

' In the times when we used to travel 
by the canal,' said my entertainer, ' I was 
coming down from Dublin. When we 
came to Mullingar the canal ended, and I 
began to walk, and stiff and fatigued I was 
after the slowness. I had some friends 
with me, and now and then we walked, 
now and then we rode in a cart. So on 
till we saw some girls milking cows, and 
stopped to joke with them. After a while 
we asked them for a drink of milk. "We 
have nothing to put it in here," they said, 
*' but come to the house with us." We 
went home with them, and sat round the 
fire talking. After a while the others 
went, and left me, loth to stir from the 
good fire. I asked the girls for something 
to eat. There was a pot on the fire, and 
they took the meat out and put it on a 
plate, and told me to eat only the meat 
that came off the head. When I had 



142 The Celtic Twilight. 

eaten, the girls went out, and I did not 
see them again. It grew darker and 
darker, and there I still sat, loth as ever 
to leave the good fire, and after a while 
two men came in, carrying between them 
a corpse. When I saw them coming I 
hid behind the door. Says one to the 
other, putting the corpse on the spit, 
" Who'll turn the spit ? " Says the other, 

" Michael H , come out of that and 

turn the meat." I came out all of a 
tremble, and began turning the spit. 

" Michael H ," says the one who 

spoke first, " if you let it burn we'll have 
to put you on the spit instead ; " and on 
that they went out. I sat there trembling 
and turning the corpse till towards mid- 
night. The men came again, and the one 
said it was burnt, and the other said it 
was done right. But having fallen out 
over it, they both said they would do me 



Drumcliff and Rosses. 143 

no harm that time ; and, sitting by the fire, 

one of them cried out : " Michael H , 

can you tell me a story?" " Divil a one," 
said I. On which he caught me by the 
shoulder, and put me out like a shot. It 
was a wild blowing night. Never in all 
my born days did I see such a night — the 
darkest night that ever came out of the 
heavens. I did not know where I was 
for the life of me. So when one of the 
men came after me and touched me on 

the shoulder, with a " Michael H , can 

you tell a story now ? " "I can," says I. 
In he brought me ; and putting me by the 
fire, says: "Begin." "I have no story 
but the one," says I, "that I was sitting 
here, and you two men brought in a corpse 
and put it on the spit, and set me turning 
it." " That will do," says he ; " ye may 
go in there and lie down on the bed." 
And I went, nothing loth; and in the 



144 The Celtic Twilight. 

morning where was I but in the middle 
of a green field ! ' 

' Drumdiff' is a great place for omens. 
Before a prosperous fishing season a 
herring-barrel appears in the midst of a 
storm-cloud ; and at a place called Colum- 
kille's Strand — a place of marsh and mire 
— on a moonlight night an ancient boat, 
with St. Columba himself, comes floating 
in from sea : a portent of a brave harvest- 
ing. They have their dread portents too. 
Some few seasons ago a fisherman saw, 
far on the horizon, renowned Hy Brazel, 
where he who touches shall find no more 
labour or care, nor cynic laughter, but 
shall go walking about under shadiest 
boscage, and enjoy the conversation of 
CuchuUin and his heroes. A vision of 
Hy Brazel forebodes national troubles. 

Drumchff and Rosses are chokeful of 
ghosts. By bog, road, rath, hillside, sea- 



Drumcliff and Rosses. 145 

border they gather in all shapes : headless 
women, men in armour, shadow hares, 
fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and 
so on. A whistling seal sank a ship the 
other day. At Drumdiff there is a very 
ancient graveyard. The An7ials of the 
Foicr Masters have this verse about a 
soldier named Denadhach, who died in 
871 : 'A pious soldier of the race of Con 
lies under hazel crosses at Drumcliff.' 
Not very long ago an old woman, turning 
to go into the churchyard at night to pray, 
saw standing before her a man in armour, 
who asked her where she was going. It 
was the 'pious soldier of the race of 
Con,' says local wisdom, still keeping 
watch, with his ancient piety, over the 
graveyard. Again, the custom is still 
common hereabouts of sprinkling the 
doorstep with the blood of a chicken on 
the death of a very young child; thus (as 

L 



146 The Celtic Twilight. 

belief is) drawing into the blood the evil 
spirits from the too weak soul. Blood is 
a great gatherer of * supernaturals.' To 
cut your hand on a stone on going into a 
fort is said to be very dangerous. 

There is no more curious ghost in 
Drumcliff or Rosses than the snipe-ghost. 
There is a bush behind a house in a 
village that I know well: for excellent 
reasons I do not say whether in 
Drumcliff or Rosses or on the slope of 
Ben Bulben, or even on the plain round 
Knocknarea. There is a history con- 
cerning the house and the bush. A man 
once lived there who found on the quay 
of Sligo a package containing three hun- 
dred pounds in notes. It was dropped 
by a foreign sea captain. This my man 
knew, but said nothing. It was money 
for freight, and the sea captain, not daring 
to face his owners, committed suicide in 



Driimcliff and Rosses. 147 

mid-ocean. Shortly afterwards my man 
died. His soul could not rest. At any 
rate, strange sounds were heard round his 
house, though that had grown and 
prospered since the freight money. The 
wife was often seen by those still alive out 
in the garden praying at the bush I have 
spoken of, — the shade of the departed 
appearing there at times. The bush 
remains to this day : once portion of a 
hedge, it now stands by itself, for no 
one dare put spade or pruning-knife 
about it. As to the strange sounds and 
voices, they did not cease till a few 
years ago, when, during some repairs, a 
snipe flew out of the solid plaster and 
away ; the troubled ghost, say the neigh- 
bours, of the note-finder was at last 
dislodged. 

My forebears and relations have lived 
near Rosses and Drumcliff these many 



148 The Celtic Twilight. 

years. A few miles northward I am 
wholly a stranger, and can find nothing. 
When I ask for stories of the faeries, my 
answer is some such as was given me by a 
woman who lives near a white stone fort 
— one of the few stone ones in Ireland — 
under the seaward angle of Ben Bulben : 
' They always mind their own affairs and 
I always mind mine : ' for it is dangerous 
to talk of the creatures. Only friendship 
for yourself or knowledge of your forebears 
will loosen these cautious tongues. My 
friend, 'the sweet Harp-String' (I give 
no more than his Irish name for fear of 
gaugers) — the best of all our folk-tale 
hunters — seems to have the science of 
unpacking the stubbornest heart, but then 
he supplies the potheen-\mk.&c?, with grain 
from his own fields. Besides, he is 
descended from a noted Gaelic magician 
who raised the * dhoul ' in Great Eliza's 



Drumcliff and Rosses. 149 

century, and he has a kind of prescriptive 
right to hear tell of all kind of other-world 
creatures. They are almost relations of 
his, if all folk say concerning the parent- 
age of magicians be true. 



THE THICK SKULL OF THE 
FORTUNATE. 



THE THICK SKULL OF THE 
FORTUNATE. 

Once a number of Icelandic peasantry 
found a very thick skull in the cemetery 
where the poet Egil was buried. Its 
great thickness made them feel certain it 
was the skull of a great man, doubtless of 
Egil himself. To be doubly sure they 
put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with 
a hammer. It got white where the blows 
fell but did not break, and they were 
convinced that it was in truth the skull of 
the poet, and worthy of every honour. 
In Ireland we have much kinship with 
the Icelanders, or ' Danes ' as we call 



154 1^^^^ Celtic Twilight, 

them and all other dwellers in the Scan- 
dinavian countries. In some of our 
mountainous and barren places, and in 
our seaboard villages, we still test each 
other in much the same way the Icelanders 
tested the head of Egil. We may have 
acquired the custom from those ancient 
Danish pirates, whose descendants the 
people of Rosses tell me still remember 
every field and hillock in Ireland which 
once belonged to their forebears, and are 
able to describe Rosses itself as well 
as any native. There is one seaboard 
district known as Roughley O'Byrne, 
where the men are never known to shave 
or trim their wild red beards, and where 
there is a fight ever on foot. I have 
seen them at a boat-race fall foul of each 
other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike 
each other with oars. The first boat had 
gone aground, and by dint of hitting out 



The Thick Skull of the Forttmate. 155 

with the long oars kept the second boat 
from passing, only to give the victory to 
the third. One day the Sligo people say 
a man from Roughley O'Byrne was tried 
in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row, and 
made the defence not unknown in Ireland, 
that some heads are so thin you cannot 
be responsible for them. Having turned 
with a look of passionate contempt to- 
wards the sohcitor who was prosecuting, 
and cried, 'that little fellow's skull if ye 
were to hit it would go like an egg-shell,' 
he beamed upon the judge, and said in a 
wheedling voice, ' but a man might wallop 
away at your lordship's for a fortnight.' 



THE RELIGION OF A SAILOR, 



THE RELIGION OF A SAILOR. 

A SEA captain when he stands upon 
the bridge, or looks out from his deck- 
house, thinks much about God and about 
the world. Away in the valley yonder 
among the corn and the poppies men 
may well forget all things except the 
warmth of the sun upon the face, and the 
kind shadow under the hedge ; but he 
who journeys through storm and darkness 
must needs think and think. One July 
a couple of years ago I took my supper 
with a Captain Moran on board the 
s.s. Margaret, then put into a western 
river from I know not where. I found 



l6o The Celtic Twilight. 

him a man of many notions all flavoured 
with personality, as is the way with sailors. 
He talked in his queer sea manner of God 
and the world, and up through all his 
words broke the hard energy of the man 
of action. 

'Sur,'said he, 'did you ever hear tell 
of the sea captain's prayer ? ' 

' No,' said I ; * what is it ? ' 

' It is,' he replied, ' " O Lord, give me 
a stiff upper lip." ' 

* And what does that mean ? ' 

' It means,' he said, ' that when they 
come to me some night and wake me up, 
and say, " Captain, we're going down," 
that I won't make a fool o' meself. Why, 
sur, we war in mid Atlantic, and I stand- 
in' on the bridge, when the third mate 
comes up to me lookin' mortial bad. Says 
he, "Captain, all's up with us," Says I, 
" Didn't you know when you joined that a 



The Religion of a Sailor. i6i 

certain percentage go down every year ? " 
"Yes, sur," says he; and says I, "Arn't 
you paid to go down ? " " Yes, sur," says 
he; and says I, "Then go down Hke a 
man, and be damned to you ! " ' 

He told this tale of himself quietly, 
simply, as if he talked of the bubbling of 
the tar between the deck planks in the 
hot sun, the gathering of barnacles along 
the keel, or of any other part of the daily 
circumstance of his calling. Let us look 
upon him with wonder, for his mind has 
not fallen into a net of complexity, nor 
his will melted into thought and dream. 
Our journey is through other storms and 
other darkness. 



CONCERNING THE NEAR- 
NESS TOGETHER OF 
HEAVEN, EARTH, AND 
PURGATORY. 



CONCERNING THE NEARNESS 

TOGETHER OF HEAVEN, EARTH, 

AND PURGATORY. 

In Ireland this world and the other are 
not widely sundered ; sometimes, indeed, 
it seems almost as if our earthly chattels 
were no more than the shadows of things 
beyond. A lady I knew once saw a 
village child running about with a long 
trailing petticoat upon her, and asked the 
creature why she did not have it cut 
short. ' It was my grandmother's,' said 
the child ; ' would you have her going 
about yonder with her petticoat up to her 
knees, and she dead but four days ? ' I 



1 66 The Celtic Twilight. 

have read a story of a woman whose 
ghost haunted her people because they 
had made her grave-clothes so short that 
the fires of purgatory burned her knees. 
The peasantry expect to have beyond 
the grave houses much like their earthly 
homes, only there the thatch will never 
grow leaky, nor the white walls lose their 
lustre, nor shall the dairy be at any time 
empty of good milk and butter. But now 
and then a landlord or an agent or a 
gauger will go by begging his bread, to 
show how God divides the righteous from 
the unrighteous. 



THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS 
STONES. 



THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS 
STONES. 

Sometimes when I have been shut off 
from common interests, and have for a 
Httle forgotten to be restless, I get waking 
dreams, now faint and shadow-like, now 
vivid and solid-looking, like the material 
world under my feet. Whether they be 
faint or vivid, they are ever beyond the 
power of my will to alter in a,ny way. 
They have their own will, and sweep 
hither and thither, and change according 
to its commands. One day I saw faintly 
an immense pit of blackness, round 
which went a circular parapet, and on 



I/O The Celtic Twilight. 

this parapet sat innumerable apes eating 
precious stones out of the palms of 
their hands. The stones glittered green 
and crimson, and the apes devoured 
them with an insatiable hunger. I knew 
that I saw the Celtic Hell, and my own 
Hell, the Hell of the artist, and that 
all who sought after beautiful and won- 
derful things with too avid a thirst, lost 
peace and form and became shapeless 
and common. I have seen into other 
people's Hells also, and saw in one an 
infernal Peter, who had a black face and 
white lips, and who weighed on a curious 
double scales not only the evil deeds 
committed, but the good deeds left un- 
done, of certain invisible shades. I 
could see the scales go up and down, 
but I could not see the shades who were, 
I knew, crowding about him. I saw on 
another occasion a quantity of demons 



TJie Eaters of Precious Stones, lyi 

of all kinds of shapes— fish-like, serpent- 
like, ape-like, and dog-like — sitting about 
a black pit such as that in my own Hell, 
and looking at a moon-like reflection of 
the Heavens which shone up from the 
depths of the pit. 



OUR LADY OF THE HILLS. 



OUR LADY OF THE HILLS. 

When we were children we did not 
say at such a distance from the post- 
office, or so far from the butcher's or 
the grocer's, but measured things by the 
covered well in the wood, or by the 
burrow of the fox in the hill. We be- 
longed then to God and to His works, 
and to things come down from the ancient 
days. We would not have been greatly 
surprised had we met the shining feet 
of an angel among the white mushrooms 
upon the mountains, for we knew in 
those days immense despair, unfathomed 
love — every eternal mood — but now the 



176 The Celtic Twilight. 

draw-net is about our feet. A few miles 
eastward of Lough Gill, a young Pro- 
testant girl, who was both pretty herself 
and prettily dressed in blue and white, 
wandered up among those mountain 
mushrooms, and I have a letter of hers 
telling how she met a troop of children, 
and became a portion of their dream. 
When they first saw her they threw them- 
selves face down in a bed of rushes, as 
if in a great fear ; but after a little other 
children came about them, and they got 
up and followed her almost bravely. She 
noticed their fear, and presently stood 
still and held out her arms. A little 
girl threw herself into them with the 
cry, ' Ah, you are the Virgin out o' the 
picture ! ' ' No,' said another, coming 
near also, ' she is a sky faery, for she 
has the colour of the sky.' 'No,' said a 
third, ' she is the faery out of the foxglove 



Our Lady of the Hills. 177 

grown big.' The other children, however, 
would have it that she was indeed the 
Virgin, for she wore the Virgin's colours. 
Her good Protestant heart was greatly 
troubled, and she got the children to 
sit down about her, and tried to explain 
who she was, but they would have none 
of her explanation. Finding explanation 
of no avail, she asked had they ever heard 
of Christ ? ' Yes,' said one ; ' but we do 
not like Him, for He would kill us if it 
were not for the Virgin.' ' Tell Him to 
be good to me,' whispered another into 
her ear. 'He would not let me near 
Him, for dad says I am a divil,' burat 
out a third. 

She talked to them a long time about 
Christ and the apostles, but was finally in- 
terrupted by an elderly woman with a stick, 
who, taking her to be some adventurous 
hunter for converts, drove the children 



178 The Celtic Twilight. 

away, despite their explanation that here 
was the great Queen of Heaven come to 
walk upon the mountain and be kind 
to them. When the children had gone 
she went on her way, and had walked 
about half-a-mile, when the child who was 
called ' a divil ' jumped down from the 
high ditch by the lane, and said she 
would believe her ' an ordinary lady ' if 
she had ' two skirts,' for ' ladies always 
had two skirts.' The ' two skirts ' were 
shown, and the child went away crest- 
fallen, but a few minutes later jumped 
down again from the ditch, and cried 
angrily, ' Dad's a divil, mum's a divil, 
and I'm a divil, and you are only an 
ordinary lady,' and having flung a hand- 
ful of mud and pebbles ran away sobbing. 
When my pretty Protestant had come to 
her own home she found that she had 
dropped the tassels of her parasol. A 



Our Lady of the Hills. 179 

year later she was by chance upon the 
mountain, but wearing now a plain black 
dress, and met the child who had first 
called her the Virgin out o' the picture, 
and saw the tassels hanging about the 
child's neck, and said, ' I am the lady 
you met last year, who told you about 
Christ.' 'No, you are not! no, you are 
not ! no, you are not ! ' was the passionate 
reply. And after all, it was not my pretty 
Protestant, but Mary, Star of the Sea, still 
walking in sadness and in beauty upon 
many a mountain and by many a shore, 
who cast those tassels at the feet of the 
child. It is indeed fitting that men pray 
to her who is the mother of peace, the 
mother of dreams, and the mother of 
purity, to leave them yet a little hour to 
do good and evil in, and to watch old 
Time telling the rosary of the stars. 



THE GOLDEN AGE. 



* 



THE GOLDEN AGE. 

A WHILE ago I was in the train, and 
getting near Sligo. The last time I had 
been there something was troubhng me, 
and I had longed for a message from 
those beings or bodiless moods, or what- 
ever they be, who inhabit the world of 
spirits. The message came, for one night 
I saw with blinding distinctness a black 
animal, half weasel half dog, moving along 
the top of a stone wall, and presently the 
black animal vanished, and from the other 
side came a white weasel-like dog, his 
pink flesh shining through his white hair 
and all in a blaze of light ; and I remem- 



184 The Celtic Twilight. 

bered a peasant belief about two faery 
dogs who go about representing day and 
night, good and evil, and was comforted 
by the excellent omen. But now I longed 
for a message of another kind, and chance, 
if chance there is, brought it, for a man 
got into the carriage and began to play 
on a fiddle made apparently of an old 
blacking-box, and though I am quite 
unmusical the sounds filled me with the 
strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a 
voice of lamentation out of the Golden 
Age. It told me that we are imperfect, 
incomplete, and no more like a beautiful 
woven web, but like a bundle of cords 
knotted together and flung into a corner. 
It said that the world was once all perfect 
and kindly, and that still the kindly and 
perfect world existed, but buried like a 
mass of roses under many spadefuls of 
earth. The faeries and the more innocent 



The Golden Age. 185 

of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented 
over our fallen world in the lamentation 
of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of 
the birds, in the moan of the waves, and 
in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that 
with us the beautiful are not clever and 
the clever are not beautiful, and that the 
best of our moments are marred by a 
little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of 
sad recollection, and that the fiddle must 
ever lament about it all. It said that if 
only they who live in the Golden Age 
could die we might be happy, for the sad 
voices would be still ; but alas ! alas ! 
they must sing and we must weep until 
the Eternal gates swing open. 

We were now getting into the big glass- 
roofed terminus, and the fiddler put away 
his old blacking-box and held out his hat 
for a copper, and then opened the door 
and was gone. 



A REMONSTRANCE WITH 

SCOTSMEN FOR HAVING 

SOURED THE DISPOSITION 

OF THEIR GHOSTS AND 

FAERIES. 



A REMONSTRANCE WITH SCOTS- 
MEN FOR HAVING SOURED 
THE DISPOSITION OF THEIR 
GHOSTS AND FAERIES. 

Not only in Ireland is faery belief still 
extant. It was only the other day I 
heard of a Scottish farmer who believed 
that the lake in front of his house was 
haunted by a water-horse. He was afraid 
of it, and dragged the lake with nets, and 
then tried to pump it empty. It would 
have been a bad thing for the water-horse 
had he found him. An Irish peasant 
would have long since come to terms 
with the creature. For in Ireland there 
is something of timid affection between 
men and spirits. They only ill-treat each 



190 The Celtic Tivilight. 

other in reason. Each admits the other 
side to have feeUngs. There are points 
beyond which neither will go. No Irish 
peasant would treat a captured faery as 
did the man Campbell tells of. He caught 
a kelpie, and tied her behind him on his 
horse. She was fierce, but he kept her 
quiet by driving an awl and a needle into 
her. They came to a river, and she grew 
very restless, fearing to cross the water. 
Again he drove the awl and needle into 
her. She cried out, ' Pierce me with the 
awl, but keep that slender, hair-like slave 
(the needle) out of me.' They came 
to an inn. He turned the light of a 
lantern on her ; immediately she dropped 
down like a falling star, and changed into 
a lump of jelly. She was dead. Nor 
would they treat the faeries as one is 
treated in an old GaeHc poem. A faery 
loved a little child who used to cut turf at 



A Remonstrance with Scotsmen. 191 

the side of a faery hill. Every day the 
faery put out his hand from the hill with 
an enchanted knife. The child used to 
cut the turf with the knife. It did not 
take long, the knife being charmed. Her 
brothers wondered why she was done so 
quickly. At last they resolved to watch, 
and find out who helped her. They saw 
the small hand come out of the earth, 
and the little child take from it the knife. 
When the turf was all cut, they saw her 
make three taps on the ground with the 
handle. The small hand came out of the 
hill. Snatching the knife from the child, 
they cut the hand off with a blow. The 
faery was never again seen. He drew his 
bleeding arm into the earth, thinking, as 
it is recorded, he had lost his hand 
through the treachery of the child. 

In Scotland you are too theological, 
too gloomy. You have made even the 



192 The Celtic Twilight. 

Devil religious. 'Where do you live, 
good-wyf, and how is the minister?' he 
said to the witch when he met her on the 
high-road, as it came out in the trial. 
You have burnt all the witches. In 
Ireland we have left them alone. To be 
sure, the 'loyal minority' knocked out 
the eye of one with a cabbage-stump on 
the 31st of March, 171 1, in the town 
of Carrickfergus. But then the * loyal 
minority ' is half Scottish. You have 
discovered the faeries to be pagan and 
wicked. You would hke to have them all 
up before the magistrate. In Ireland 
warlike mortals have gone amongst them, 
and helped them in their battles, and 
they in turn have taught men great skill 
with herbs, and permitted some few to 
hear their tunes. Carolan slept upon 
a faery rath. Ever after their tunes ran 
in his head, and made him the great 



A Remonstrance with Scotsmen. 193 

musician he was. In Scotland you have 
denounced them from the pulpit. In 
Ireland they have been permitted by the 
priests to consult them on the state of 
their souls. Unhappily the priests have 
decided that they have no souls, that they 
will dry up like so much bright vapour at 
the last day ; but more in sadness than in 
anger have they said it. The Catholic 
religion likes to keep on good terms with 
its neighbours. 

These two different ways of looking at 
things have influenced in each country 
the whole world of sprites and gobhns. 
For their gay and graceful doings you 
must go to Ireland ; for their deeds of 
terror to Scotland. Our Irish faery terrors 
have about them something of make- 
believe. When a peasant strays into an 
enchanted hovel, and is made to turn a 

corpse all night on a spit before the fire, 
o 



194 T^f^^ Celtic Tivilight. 

we do not feel anxious ; we know he will 
wake in the midst of a green field, the 
dew on his old coat. In Scotland it is 
altogether different. You have soured the 
naturally excellent disposition of ghosts 
and gobhns. The piper M'Crimmon, of 
the Hebrides, shouldered his pipes, and 
marched into a sea cavern, playing loudly, 
and followed by his dog. For a long 
time the people could hear the pipes. 
He must have gone nearly a mile, when 
they heard the sound of a struggle. Then 
the piping ceased suddenly. Some time 
went by, when his dog came out of the 
cavern completely flayed, too weak even 
to howl. Nothing else ever came out of 
the cavern. Then there is the tale of the 
man who dived into a lake where treasure 
was thought to be. He saw a great coffer 
of iron. Close to the coffer lay a monster, 
who warned him to return whence he 



A Remonstrance ivith Scotsmen. 195 

came. He rose to the surface ; but the 
bystanders, when they heard he had seen 
the treasure, persuaded him to dive again. 
He dived. In a little while his heart and 
liver floated up, reddening the water. No 
man ever saw the rest of his body. 

These water-goblins and water-monsters 
are prominent in Scottish folk-lore. We 
have them too, but take them much less 
dreadfully. Our tales turn all their doings 
to favour and to prettiness, or hopelessly 
humorize the creatures. A hole in the 
Sligo river is haunted by one of these 
monsters. He is ardently beHeved in by 
many, but that does not prevent the 
peasantry playing with the subject, and 
surrounding it with conscious phantasies. 
When I was a small boy I fished one day 
for congers in the monster hole. Return- 
ing home, a great eel on my shoulder, his 
head flapping down in front, his tail 



196 TJie Celtic Twilight. 

sweeping the ground behind, I met a 
fisherman of my acquaintance. I began 
a tale of an immense conger, three times 
larger than the one I carried, that had 
broken my line and escaped. * That 
was him,' said the fisherman. ' Did you 
ever hear how he made my brother 
emigrate ? My brother was a diver, you 
know, and grubbed stones for the Harbour 
Board. One day the beast comes up to 
him, and says, "What are you after?" 
" Stones, sur," says he. " Don't you think 
you had better be going?" "Yes, sur," 
says he. And that's why my brother 
emigrated. The people said it was because 
l>e got poor, but that's not true.' 

You — you will make no terms with the 
spirits of fire and earth and air and water. 
You have made the Darkness your enemy. 
We — we exchange civiUties with the world 
beyond. 



THE FOUR WINDS OF 
DESIRE. 



THE FOUR WINDS OF DESIRE. 

In the notes at the end of Beside the 
Fire, Dr. Hyde contrasts with certain 
tales of Indian jugglery an old Gaelic 
account of a magician who threw a rope- 
ladder into the air and then sent climbing 
up it all manner of men and beasts. It 
reads like an allegory to explain the 
charms of folk and faery-tales : a parable 
to show how man mounts to the infinite 
by the ladder of the impossible. When 
our narrow rooms, our short lives, our 
soon-ended passions and emotions, put 
us out of conceit with sooty and finite 
reality, we have only to read some story 



200 The Celtic Twilight. 

like Dr. Hyde's 'Paudeen O'Kelly and 
the Weasel,' and listen to the witch com- 
plaining to the robber, ' Why did you 
bring away my gold that I was for five 
hundred years gathering through the hills 
and hollows of the world ? ' Here at 
last is a universe where all is large and 
intense enough to almost satisfy the 
emotions of man. Certainly such -stories 
are not a criticism of life but rather an 
extension, thereby much more closely 
resembling Homer than that last and 
most admirable phase of 'the improving 
book,' a social drama by Henrik Ibsen. 
They are as existence and not a thought, 
and make our world of tea-tables seem 
but a shabby penumbra. 

It is perhaps, therefore, by no means 
strange that the age of 'realism' should 
be also the harvest-time of folk-lore. We 
grow tired of tuning our fiddles to the 



The Four Winds of Desire. 201 

clank of this our heavy chain, and lay 
them down to listen gladly to one who 
tells us of men hundreds of years old 
and endlessly mirthful. Our new-wakened 
interest in the impossible has been of the 
greatest service to Irish folk-literature. 
Until about five years ago the only writers 
who had dealt with the subject at any 
length were Crofton Croker, a second- 
hand bookseller named Kennedy, and 
an anonymous writer in The Dublin and 
London Magazine for 1825 and 1828. 
Others, it is true, had incorporated (like 
Gerald Griffin) odd folk-tales in the pages 
of long novels, or based on them (like 
Carleton and Lover) stories of peasant 
life. Croker was certainly no ideal col- 
lector. He altered his materials without 
word or warning, and could never resist 
the chance of turning some naive faery tale 
into a drunken peasant's dream. With all 



2C2 The Celtic TwiligJit. 

his buoyant humour and imagination he 
was continually guilty of that great sin 
against art — the sin of rationalism. He 
tried to take aAvay from his stories the 
impossibility that makes them dear to us. 
Nor could he quite desist from dressing 
his personages in the dirty rags of the 
stage Irishman. Kennedy, an incompar- 
ably worse writer, had one great advantage : 
he believed in his goblins as sincerely 
as any peasant. He has explained in 
his Legendary Fictions that he could tell 
a number of spells for raising the faeries, 
but he will not — for fear of putting his 
readers up' to mischief. Years went by, 
and it seemed that we should never have 
another gathering. Then about five years 
ago came Lady Wilde's two volumes, 
and David Fitzgerald's contributions to 
the Revue Celtique ; with M'Anally's inac- 
curate and ill-written Irish Wonders, and 



The Four Winds of Desire. 203 

Curtin's fine collection a little later ; and 
now appears Dr. Hyde's incomparable 
book. There has been published in 
five years as much Irish folk-lore as in 
the foregoing fifty. Its quality, too, is 
higher. Dr. Hyde's volume is the best 
written of any. He has caught and faith- 
fully reproduced the peasant idiom and 
phrase. In becoming scientifically ac- 
curate, he has not ceased to be a man 
of letters. His fifteen translations from 
traditional Gaelic originals are models of 
what such translations should be. Unlike 
Campbell of Islay, he has not been con- 
tent merely to turn the Gaelic into 
English ; but where the idiom is radically 
different he has searched out colloquial 
equivalents from among the English- 
speaking peasants. The Gaelic is printed 
side by side with the English, so that the 
substantial accuracy of his versions can 



204 T^f^^ Celtic Twilight. 

always be tested. The result is many 
pages in which you can hear in imagina- 
tion the very voice of the sennachie, and 
almost smell the smoke of his turf fire. 

Now and then Dr. Hyde has collected 
stories which he was compelled to write 
out in his own Irish through the impossi- 
bility, he tells us, of taking them down 
word for word at the time. He has only 
printed a half of one story of this kind 
in Beside the Fire. One wishes he had 
not been so rigorous in the matter, 
especially as it is for this reason, I con- 
clude, that Teig O'Kane, still the weirdest 
of Irish folk-tales, has been omitted. It 
has been printed elsewhere, but one 
would gladly have his stories under one 
cover. He is so completely a Gael, alike 
in thought and literary idiom, that I do 
not think he could falsify a folk-tale if 
he tried. At the most he would change 



The Four Winds of Desire. 205 

it as a few years' passing from sennachie 
to sennachie must do perforce. Two 
villages a mile apart will have different 
versions of the same story; why, then, 
should Dr. Hyde exclude his own reverent 
adoptions ? We cannot all read them in 
the Gaelic of his Leabhar Sgeulaighteachta. 
Is it the evil communications of that very 
scientific person, Mr. Alfred Nutt (he 
contributes learned notes), which have 
robbed us of the latter pages of Guleesh 
na Guss Dhu ? We might at least have 
had some outline of the final adventures 
of the young faery seer and the French 
princess. After all, imaginative impulse 
— the quintessence of life — is our great 
need from folk-lore. When we have 
banqueted let Learning gather the crumbs 
into her larder, and welcome. She will 
serve them up again in time of famine. 
Dr. Hyde has four tales of hidden 



2o6 The Celtic Twilight. 

treasure, five stories of adventure with a 
princess or a fortune at the end, a legend 
of a haunted forest, and a tale of a man 
who grew very thin and weakly through 
swallowing a hungry newt, which was only 
dislodged when made wildly athirst by 
a heavy dinner of salt pork and the 
allurement of a running stream. Love, 
fortune, adventure, wonder — the four 
winds of desire ! There is also a chapter 
of quaint riddles in rhyme. The whole 
book is full of charming expressions. 
The French princess is described as 'the 
loveliest woman on the ridge of the world. 
The rose and the lily were fighting to- 
gether in her face, and one could not 
tell which would get the victory.' Here 
and there, too, is a piece of delicate 
observation, as when Guleesh na Guss 
Dhu waits for the faeries listening to 
'the cronawn (hum) of the insects,' and 



The Four Wmds of Desire. 207 

watching ' the fadoques and fibeens 
(golden and green clover) rising and 
lying, lying and rising, as they do on a 
fine night.' The riddles also have no 
lack of poetry. Here is a description 
of a boreen or little country lane : 

* From house to house he goes, 
A messenger small and slight, 
And whether it rains or snows 
He sleeps outside in the night.' 

And here is one of the lintel on a wet 

day — 

' There's a poor man at rest, 
With a stick beneath his breast, 
And he breaking his heart a-crying.' 

These riddles are the possession of 
children, and have the simple fancifulness 
of childhood. 

It is small wonder that this book should 
be beautiful, for it is the chronicle of that 
world of glory and surprise imagined in the 
unknown by the peasant as he leant pain- 



2o8 The Celtic Tivilight. 

fully over his spade. His spiritual desires 
ascended into heaven, but all he could 
dream of material well-being and freedom 
was lavished upon this world of kings and 
goblins. We who have less terrible a 
need dream less splendidly. Dr. Hyde 
bids us know that all this exultant world 
of fancies is passing away, soon to exist 
for none but stray scholars and the gentle- 
men of the sun-myth. He has written on 
his title-page this motto from an old Gaelic 
poem : * They are like a mist on the 
coming of night that is scattered away by 
a light breath of wind.' I know that this 
is the common belief of folk-lorists, but I do 
not feel certain that it is altogether true. 
Much, no doubt, will perish — perhaps the 
whole tribe of folk-tales proper; but the 
faery and ghost kingdom is more stubborn 
than men dream of. It will perhaps be 
always going and never gone. I have 



The Four Winds of Desire. 209 

talked with many who believe they have 
seen it, and I have had my own glimpse 
of unaccountable things. Why should 
Swedenborg alone have visions? Surely 
the mantle of Coleridge's ' man of ten 
centuries ' is large enough to cover the 
witch-doctors at any rate. There is 
not so much difference between them. 
Swedenborg's assertion, in the Spiritual 
Diary, that 'the angels do not like 
butter,' would make admirable folk-lore. 
Dr. Hyde finds a sun-myth in one of his 
most ancient stories. The sun and the 
revolving seasons have not yet done helping 
to draw legends from the right minds. 
Some time ago a friend of mine talked with 
an old Irish peasant who had seen a vision 
of a great tree, amid whose branches two 
animals, one white and one black, pursued 
each other continually ; and wherever the 
white beast came the branches burst into 



2IO The Celtic Twilight. 

foliage, and wherever the black one, then 
all withered away. The changing of the 
seasons, among the rest, is here very 
palpable. Only let it be quite plain that 
the peasant's vision meant much more 
than the mere atmospheric allegory of the 
learned. He saw within his tree the birth 
and death of all things. It cast a light 
of imagination on his own dull cattle- 
minding and earth-turning destiny, and 
gave him heart to repeat the Gaelic 
proverb — 'The lake is not burdened by 
its swan, a steed by its bridle, or a man 
by the soul that is in him.' 



INTO THE TWILIGHT. 

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, 

Come clear of the nets of wrojig and 

right; 
Latigh, heart, again in the gray twilight; 

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. 

Thy mother Eri is always young. 
Dew ever shining a?id twilight gray ; 
Though hope fall from thee or love decay, 

Burni7ig in fires of a slanderous tongue. 

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upo?i hill. 
For there the jnystical brotherhood 
Of the flood atid flame, of the hight and 
wood. 
Laugh out their whimsy and work out 
their will. 



212 The Celtic Tivilight. 

And God stands whiding his lonely horn ; 
And Time and the World are ever in 

flight. 
And love is less kind than the gray 
twilight, 
And hope is less dear- than the dew of the 
morn. 



Richard Clay &• Sons, Limited, London & Siingay. 



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